Meta has lost more than $80 billion on Reality Labs trying to build a virtual world from scratch. On the other hand, Roblox lets its users build the world themselves, scaling past 150 million daily active users and a market capitalization above $30 billion (at the time of publication). Same sector, same technology—except one saw the formula, letting users create value at near-zero marginal cost, while the other assumed the old rules still applied.

For most of modern business history, success was determined by knowledge and execution. Knowledge was shaped by institutions and geography, while execution hinged on capital and time. Today, an entrepreneur in Doha, Lagos, or Sofia can compete for the same client as anyone anywhere, and anyone can turn imagination into execution by describing what they want in “natural language” and letting AI build it.

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