Anyone Can Build. The Question is What?

Why I’m putting $2M behind the answer.

Five years ago, if you had a great idea you needed an engineering team, a seed round, and more than 18 months to find out if it worked.

That era is over.

The cost of shipping software has dropped 10x in 24 months. A solo founder can build in a weekend what used to require a team and a year. The ‘builders class’ known as anyone with literacy, internet access, and a frontier AI model, is rapidly expanding from 47 million developers today toward a projected 1 billion by 2030.

This is the fastest expansion of a participating population since the smartphone. Before that, the printing press. Before that, the alphabet.

Every time the builder class expands by an order of magnitude, civilization changes. The question is: what direction does it change in?

That’s the reason I just launched the “Build with Gemini XPRIZE” — a $2 million global hackathon, built on Google’s Gemini stack, to find the builders who will point these tools at problems that actually matter.

Let me tell you why.

High Agency Is the New Credential

A 41-year-old self-taught coder in LA named Matthew Gallagher launched a GLP-1 weight-loss telehealth platform in September 2024. He spent $20,000. An AI chatbot to handle customer service.

His team consists of two people: him and his brother.

In his first year revenue crushed $401 million with a total of 250,000 customers. His current run rate: over $3 million per day, tracking toward $1.8 billion in 2026.

I want you to think about that for a second. Two people. $20,000. A dozen AI tools wired into an existing supply chain. No venture round. No engineering team.

That is what happens when high agency meets a real, painful problem: the cost of building drops to nearly zero.

And it’s why we put $2 million on the line with Google and XPRIZE to inspire more people like him. To inspire people build companies rather than find jobs.

The Proof Is Already Here

I’m not being provocative for the sake of it. The data is clear.

A Harvard-linked study found that roles heavy on repetitive, structured tasks, the kind where your value was being “the person who does X”, saw job postings drop roughly 13%. Meanwhile, AI-augmented roles requiring analysis, judgment, and creativity grew about 20%.

Read that again. The market is quietly deleting jobs where your value was doing the task and replacing them with jobs where your value is figure out how to plug AI into the opportunity and own the outcome.

McKinsey data shows job ads asking for “AI fluency” have surged faster than almost any other skill category. Not AI research. Not machine learning PhDs, but fluency. The ability to pick up these tools and do something useful with them.

The old question was: What degree did you get? What job can you land? Where did you go to school?

The new question is simpler: What will you build?

I’ve been saying for years that the world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. That hasn’t changed, what’s changed is who gets to go after them. It used to be credentialed engineers with millions in backing. Now it’s anyone with agency, passion and a laptop.

That is a civilizational shift. And most people are sleeping through it.

Not convinced? Let me tell you another story that’s equally as shocking:

In December 2024, an Australian tech founder named Paul Conyngham used AI, including Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold to design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. He’s not a molecular biologist. He’s a guy with a laptop and a dog he loves very much. Eight weeks later, his dog’s largest tumor had shrunk by 75%.

In 2025, a 26-year-old solo founder named Maor Shlomo sold his AI-coded startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million cash. Built alone. Six months. 300,000 users. $3.5 million in annual revenue. No employees and no investors.

Stripe’s 2024 data says 44% of profitable software businesses are now run by solo founders.

I’ve been writing about exponential technologies for thirty years and I have never seen a cost curve drop this fast.

The builders are arriving by the millions. The only remaining question is what will you build?

The Vibe Coding Revolution

Andrej Karpathy gave it a name in February 2025: vibe coding. Software built by describing what you want in plain English. Now its default mode for a new generation of builders.

Let me give you some examples that would have been impossible three years ago.

A writer built Taste, a social network for sharing food preferences and dietary needs. She didn’t wait to “learn to code.” She vibe-coded a social app because her friends needed it.

A recruiter built a resume-scoring agent using Zapier and natural language. It reads job descriptions, scores incoming resumes, and plugs into thousands of apps.

These examples are just some of the millions occurring across the globe and companies are starting to notice.

For reference, here’s the cost picture: inference costs have fallen over 90% in a single year. Open-source models are running on laptops and companies are using AI to generate their own training data, cutting labeling costs by another 90%. Whole categories of “we should just buy this SaaS” are turning into “let’s have one person vibe-code it this weekend.”

Every time the builder class expands by an order of magnitude, civilization changes. We are in the middle of one of those expansions right now.

The $50 Trillion Question

Here’s something that keeps me motivated to do what I do:

Half of global GDP runs through five sectors: Education. Human potential. Entrepreneurship and small business. Financial access. Professional services.

The worst part is these sectors are running $50 trillion inefficiently. Systems designed in the 1970s, running on processes that haven’t been meaningfully updated since the fax machine. A teacher in Nairobi with a curriculum that works but no platform to scale it. A nurse in Manila who knows exactly how to fix hospital scheduling but has never written a line of code. A farmer in Iowa who could save her entire industry if someone would just build the software she’s been describing for a decade.

Those people can build now. Gemini doesn’t care about your résumé, your zip code, or your CS degree. It cares about your problem description.

The question is whether we point these tools at the world most important problems, I’m betting we can, and we’re putting real money behind it.

The “$2M” Build with Gemini XPRIZE: How It Works

The mandate is simple: Solve a real problem that impacts 100,000 people or more. Generate real revenue doing it.

We don’t care about your pitch deck. We care about lives changed and problems solved.

The prizes: $2 million total. $500k grand prize. No equity taken. No clawbacks. Cash wires to the winner.

The timeline: 90 days. Submissions close mid August. The finale is September 25 in downtown Los Angeles at the Moonshots Gathering (moonshots.com).

If you’ve been sitting on an idea for ten years, the wait is over. You can build it now for $20/month and a weekend.

If you’re a domain expert in a field software hasn’t touched, you have 90 days to rewrite the rules of your industry. Nobody knows your industry’s problems better than you, and for the first time in history, that knowledge is enough.

Where I Stand

I’ll be direct about why this matters to me personally.

I’ve spent my career building XPRIZE on a single principle: incentive prizes break problems that committees cannot. $10 million became a private spaceflight. $15 million became adaptive learning for kids without schools. $100 million became carbon removal at scale.

But this one is different.

Every previous XPRIZE required specialized teams with deep technical credentials. That was the whole point, you needed rocket scientists to build rockets.

This is the first XPRIZE where the winner might be someone with no technical background at all. A teacher. A nurse. A farmer. Someone who has spent twenty years understanding a problem and now, for the first time, has the tools to solve it themselves.

That’s not a feel-good story. That’s a structural shift in who gets to participate in building the future. And I believe it will produce solutions the credentialed class never would have found, because they never lived the problems.

The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities. If you solve a problem for a billion people, you become a billionaire. It’s that simple.

A laptop. Wi-Fi. One weekend. That’s the entire barrier between you and what comes next.

Learn more about the Build With Gemini XPRIZE

To an Abundant future,

— Peter