The Biggest Gold Rush In History Is Now

Throughout history, major technological revolutions have always created gold rush moments—explosive opportunities for economic gain. These opportunities have been traditionally available to just two archetypes:

1. Incumbent wealthy elites who had the capital and connections to fund new projects.
2. Visionary innovators or early-adopting entrepreneurs who (to be frank) happened to live in a close proximity to the innovation.

If we look at the technological innovations starting from the industrial revolution up until today, we can split them up into 3 groups based on how accessible the created economic opportunity was for the general public:

• Early Industrial Revolutions (Almost non-existent access)
  • Steam Engine
  • Internal Combustion Engine
  • Electrification & Power Grids
  • Railroads
• Silicon Valley Tech Revolutions (Limited to entrepreneurs and investors in SV)
  • Transistors & Semiconductors
  • Personal Computers
  • Internet (Dot-Com Boom)
• Post-Internet Tech Revolutions (Mostly accessible)
  • Cloud Computing
  • Smartphones
  • And now AI

Early Industrial Revolutions

In this first era, innovations like the steam engine, internal combustion engine, electrification, and railroads fundamentally reshaped economies. But the vast resources needed to build factories, lay tracks, or construct power grids meant only wealthy industrialists and politically connected entrepreneurs could participate. The average person had no way to directly benefit from these innovations — they became factory workers, not factory owners.

These transformations unleashed massive productivity gains: factories replaced cottage industries, mechanized farming boosted food production, and steam-powered ships cut travel time across oceans. Yet despite these advances, the economic spoils stayed in the hands of those who either had capital or lived close to the early centers of invention (e.g., Britain for steam engines, the U.S. for railroads). This dynamic established a pattern: a groundbreaking technology emerges, and a tiny minority stands to gain while everyone else becomes a consumer or worker on the periphery.

Silicon Valley Tech Revolutions

Fast-forward to the mid-to-late 20th century, and we see the birth of transistors, personal computers, and eventually the internet. While less infrastructure-dependent than building railroads or refineries, these revolutions were still tightly linked to Silicon Valley, where venture capital and research labs (like Stanford, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Xerox PARC) clustered.

Trailblazers such as William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove turned Silicon Valley into the world's electronics hub. Later, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple, along with Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, brought personal computing to the masses.

Then came the dot-com boom, when a handful of tech pioneers—like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) and Marc Andreessen (Netscape)—capitalized on the internet's explosive growth.

Yet again, location was key. Entrepreneurs fortunate enough to be in Northern California, or who could move there, had a massive edge in funding, mentorship, and networking. You have to realise - building software back then wasn't as simple and inexpensive as it is today which is a result of the post-internet's tech revolutions.

Post-Internet Tech Revolutions

With the maturation of the internet came new platforms and distribution models— cloud computing, smartphones, and now, AI. Unlike earlier eras, these tools require minimal upfront capital: a laptop, an internet connection, and cloud-based infrastructure is enough to launch a product worldwide, almost instantly. This shift has created a far more level playing field, allowing independent developers and small startups from around the globe to compete and reap the benefits of these technologies.

Cloud computing (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) lowered the knowledge and capital necessary to deploy an app globally, smartphones (iPhone and Android) put a powerful device in billions of pockets and made all of them an easily accessible potential customer, and AI — the newest revolution — builds on all these enabling factors. The barriers to entry are lower than ever. While giant tech companies train colossal frontier AI models, the application layer is wide open for entrepreneurs and innovators to develop AI-driven solutions utilising the intelligence provided by these models with a simple API call. Now, almost anyone, anywhere, can seize the opportunity and become part of this new gold rush.

AI's Abstraction Layers

In the context of this article we will be defining three abstraction layers of AI, it's more like a reverse pyramid (see image below) where each next layer has more players participating and it's more 'democratised'.

• Hardware & Chips (Bottom)
  • The physical infrastructure that this technology runs on-think NVIDIA GPUs, TSMC fabs, etc.
• Frontier Models (Middle)
  • Cutting-edge, large-scale AI systems built by big players (OpenAI, Google, etc.)
• Application Layer (Top)
  • Software that directly uses these models to deliver AI-driven features to end-users

And yes, the average person will not compete when it comes to the first two layers of AI - I mean the 'Magnificent 7'—a nickname for today's largest U.S. tech giants by market cap all announced hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures for just 2025 alone in order to build out data centers to host their AI mega-clusters and compete in the race to Super Intelligence.

The average Joe doesn't have a ticket to that race, however the top layer - the application layer is an open competition, and it's likely that it will be the layer that will capture the biggest economic growth from AI in the long run.

The Opportunity In The Application Layer

A prime example for this is the Cursor IDE, an Application Layer App that is model-agnostic, which was founded by four 20-something year old under-graduates from MIT back in 2023. They managed to reach $100M ARR (anualized recurring revenue) in record time (see chart below) leading to a $2.5B valuation in less than 2 years.

So yeah, you won't be competing to build a Frontier Model to take on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or the other AI Labs, but you can use the intelligence these companies are building and leverage it to create what I would call a "post-ai-era" software, which has seamless integration of on-demand-intelligence provided through API by these companies.

Anyone can do this - all you need is a computer, an internet connection, and a desire to build.

"Why Software (AI) Is Eating The World"

All software eventually will have this intelligence built in - there is no domain or industry that is immune to this. Deeply engrained into Silicon Valley's mythos is the legendary blog post "Why Software Is Eating the World" written by Marc Andreessen, a legendary Entrepreneur and VC back in 2011.

In it, he postulates that Software will take over the world and disrupt all industries - 14 years later that's proven to be true, and this bet has made him a billionaire. To drive this point home check out the top 10 public companies by market cap back when he wrote the blog and compare them to the top 10 companies now.

Top 10 Public Companies by Market Cap Back In 2011

• Exxon Mobil (Oil & Gas) - $414 B
• Apple (Software & Hardware) - $380 B
• Chevron (Oil & Gas) - $295 B
• PetroChina (Oil & Gas) - $280 B
• Microsoft (Software) - $220 B
• China Mobile (Telekom) - $213 B
• ICBC (Banking) - $210 B
• Royal Dutch Shell (Oil & Gas) - $170 B
• Google (Software) - $172 B
• Walmart (Retail) - $160 B

Top 10 Public Companies By Market Cap in 2025:

• Apple (Software & Hardware) - $3.7 T - 947% growth since 2011
• NVidia (Software & Hardware) - $3.4 T - 34,850% growth since 2011
• Microsoft (Software) - $3.1 T - 1622% growth since 2011
• Amazon (Software) - $2.4 T - 2518% growth since 2011
• Google (Software) - $2.3 T - 1426% growth since 2011
• Meta (Software) - $1.8 T - 1873% growth since 2012 (IPO)
• Saudi Aramco (Oil & Gas) - $1.8 T - 9.08% decline since 2019 (IPO)
• Tesla (Software + EV Automobiles) - $1.1 T - 19,181% growth since 2011
• Broadcom (Hardware) - $1 T - 7010% growth since 2011
• TSMC (Hardware) - $1 T - 1677% growth since 2011

Insane.

Honestly, it's interesting to me that even 14 years ago this wasn't obvious to everyone having exposure to Software, although I am sure it was for the majority of Silicon Valley where Marc operated from, however to the rest of the world it seems it was quite a bit more opaque since the majority of people have not been riding the biggest (so far!) economical wave of growth in history.

It's also fascinating how relevant that blog would be if you post it today, but just swap around a few examples and replace the word "Software" with "AI" across the whole blog. Just read these two short snippets:

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software(AI) and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software(AI), with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

…

In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software(AI) revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in many industries, new software(AI) ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software(AI)-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term "creative destruction," would be proud.

Now to be clear I'm not saying AI and Software are two different things, AI is just the latest culmination of the evolution of software, and going forward they will be indistinguishable. All successful commercial software will have to integrate this intelligence layer within their UX or it will lose to a competitor that does it.

In the next 5 years the battle within the application layer will be won by those who integrate this intelligence and provide it to their users in the best package possible - seamless and magical - that's the UX that will come out on top. Those who fail to integrate intelligence or poorly do it in their software solutions will lose out by default.

Pushing All My Chips In

For someone like me, living in Skopje, Macedonia, the AI revolution represents a monumental shift. Traditionally, opportunities in tech & business in general have been concentrated in richer, larger and more advanced countries. This centralization meant that people from smaller countries, like Macedonia, were often on the sidelines, with almost non-existant access to the vast economic gains from technological revolutions and opportunities that come from large markets.

Running the "How To Make It From Macedonia" podcast, I had the privilege of interviewing many successful macedonians. What became clear was that the most successful stories often involved relocating to countries with more opportunities. This underscored the limited local opportunities and the small ambitions that naturally come from operating in a smaller ecosystem.

My early ventures, like many entrepreneurs here, were focused on solving local problems with limited scale. This mindset was a product of the environment, where examples of global success were scarce.

Now, with AI, everything is changing. The barriers that once kept us from competing on a global scale are crumbling. At MVP Masters, we've built a great team of engineers and developed efficent processes for building software. This positions us perfectly to leverage the AI revolution to build AI-integrated products that will compete on the global stage and disrupt a plethora of industries.

In the next five years, this is what I'll be doing: going all-in. If you're someone in a similar situation, now is the time.This is our chance to pick up a shovel and start digging—because the gold rush is here, and for the first time in history - it's accessible to all of us.