That's too simplistic to be useful. There are plenty of small businesses to be had grooming other people's castles in other people's kingdoms. Groundskeeper, for instance. While we'd all like to be the next Google or OpenAI, not everybody has that kind of opportunity, and it should just be recognized as a business risk, like any other. Entrepreneurship has risks. That's the entire premise of it. If it were a sure thing, everyone would just do that. The problem is that you simply can't avoid every possible kingdom and you'll waste more time if you build everything from scratch. QuickBooks could kick you off their system, but unless you're a Fintech company, reinventing that wheel, and finding a bookkeeper who will work with your custom bookkeeping software is just not reasonable for every single facet of your business.

So build your castle in Anthropic's kingdom, write your code in such a way that you can swap out for OpenAI or Llama in a couple of hours/days.

Know which kingdoms are likely to kick you out and which ones aren't.

If your company is built in the kingdom of the USA, what's the business continuity plans if the US dollar collapses? Do you have one? Why is that such a ridiculous question when, in terms of building in someone else's kingdom, that's probably the most real "kingdom" some of us live in?

In regard to your Kingdom question, no.

- Humans are always peer relative, no exception.

If everyone around you is affected by the same thing, it doesn't affect you as much. It doesn't affect your chances to marry, have children or gain status, which tend to drive a lot of people (look at mimetic competition). When interest rates go up, it exposes the 10-15% of the population who were heavily debted, but the majority do fine, moan together, and move on, saving more cautiously.

So it does make a difference. Online Kingdoms are transient and flipping a switch; information advantages are more abound. That is not so true offline - the people you meet in person are roughly speaking, going through the same challenges on a macro economic scale as you.

People here rightly have an issue with the fact that technology is allowing consolidation and reducing the number of entrepreneurship options which have no fundamental reliance on a platform entity. Even though the rise of online sellers (Etsy, Ebay etc) has made the number of self-employed people or company directors rise on paper, it had not kept up with increases in population, and there are far less self-employed people earning a wage above the median salary wage than there were in say the year 2000. If you look at Microconf stats you will see that today the majority of entrepreneurs are earning similar amounts to employees; once you adjust for skill difference (entrepreneurs tend to have higher market value than the average employee), you can see something is going a little awry in the economy.

I agree with your point you'd waste too much time building from scratch. However, generally the bar for businesses and software has risen; I think this is because whereas in 2000 you might spend 50% of your time working with polished products from big companies, today you spend 80-90% of your time in Google Docs/Instagram. A single bug or slow load in that remaining 10% makes you quickly search for an alternate solution. But the fact building on existing platforms can abate the problem of delivering high quality value to the customer does not remove the risk it introduces to rely on a specific platform with arbitrary or non-existent customer support.

Back in the 2000s for example, people actually believed that technology would enable more global competition and more distributed business. So it's curious that it has turned on it's head.

Furthermore there is reason to be personally optimistic: over the course of their lifetimes, most people reach at least the top 30th income percentile for 10 years or more. In other words, with more experience and skill, most people earn enough to save money, and this applies across almost all demographics. Income correlates far more with age than basically anything else. Which is great because if you feel rubbish now in your 20s, your upwards potential is massive. It doesn't matter if in 20 years the dollar has collapsed, your income will likely be in the top 30-40%, and that will give you a significant edge in the economy, whatever it is relatively like for your peers.