And with all due respect to unicorns, mind you.

We came across an interesting podcast, with our bud Shira Lazar interviewing BarkBox co-founder cum Audos founder Henrik Werdelin. As USNN noted, “With the launch of Audos, Werdelin “envisions expanding the startup landscape from a few dozen ventures annually to potentially hundreds of thousands… by helping anyone—techie or not—build a million-dollar business using AI.”

This is not an endorsement of Werdelin’s new venture, but we agree with him – and have said it before ourselves – as he mentions in his soon-to-be published book, Me, My Customer and AI, which delves into the new frontier of entrepreneurship,” that “emotional connection and “relationship capital” are your moat in an age of automation.”

Cheers to that and he discusses the importance of customer relations, positing that “the future belongs to “donkeycorns:” small, scrappy, and unstoppable creatures who “grind like mules, and party like unicorns” and for whom the key to success will be customer engagement: the personal touch, unlike Hertz, for instance, who are using AI systems that over-estimate damages to rental cars, with the frustrating additional feature that customers can’t complain to anyone because customer service is also now handled by generative AI, as we recently reported – and noted that this might lead to a rise in the online version of mom-and-pops. Enter the donkeycorn, it seems!

These companies may never become unicorns but rather think of them more as corner stores with their own loyal customer base, given that customer engagement is prioritized, and as Werdelin pointed out, they’re sort of subreddits rife with customer/business interaction. The softer side of Sears and with more customers than the physical corner store.

Never underestimate or fail to consider what your customers may want or expect. Case in point: “ChatGPT users are mass cancelling OpenAI subscriptions after GPT-5 launch,” LiveMint reported. “Despite all (the improvements the company made), longtime ChatGPT users were not happy with the upgrade provided by the AI startup, as the company also went on to discontinue older models like GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1-mini, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3, and o3-pro.”

Meanwhile, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks said the doomsday scenario of AI wiping out jobs is ‘overhyped’. “The truism that ‘you’re not going to lose your job to AI but to someone who uses AI better than you’ is holding up well” but this just in: newly-minted grads are now vying for jobs at Chipotle (Goodbye, $165,000 tech jobs. Student coders seek work at Chipotle), the Seattle Times reported. It seems that gone are the days when a computer science degree guaranteed a six-figure salary out of the gate, especially when AIs are there to do the programming and as the article noted “Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1% and 7.5% respectively… That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3%.”

Does that mean that biology and art history graduates do a better job front-of-house at Chipotle, or are their skills somehow helpful in this new age of tech and keep in mind that in the early days of search engines, an invaluable skill to have? A degree in Library Science. Go know.

We do wonder if a pivot to self-sustaining – qua independent of the need for outside capital – companies will be the next phase in entrepreneurship, even as AI-enabled companies continue to chase institutional money. After all, “AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace,” CNBC reported. “There are now 498 AI “unicorns,” or private AI companies with valuations of $1 billion or more, with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, according to CB Insights.” ‘AI’ may be the latest investor catnip, but that gravy train will come to a stop at some point, as it did in the Age of Social. It seems investors have something of a short memory, but truth be told, the same can be said of founders.

As for ‘donkeycorns,’ considering that entrepreneurship has long been in Americans’ blood, it may be time to do some soul-searching – and research, recent grads et al – consider what’s missing in the marketplace and go for it. AI might be a useful tool to do so but also keep in mind that LLMs are all scraping everything, so again, proceed with extreme prejudice. They’re scraping you, too. Then review the output from a human perspective and with human needs in mind: that’s where AIs do fall a bit short. In fact, when Werdelin was writing his book, he figured he’d put it through the AI grinder and have a finished product in no time at all, failing to keep in mind that no LLMs have won any prizes for literature or even for outstanding business journals, so there will come a point where you have to insert a human into the equation. Writing is easy: editing, not so much.

‘Donkeycorn’ is an interesting designation and okay, we’ll play. Execute properly and you may well reach the point where you’ll be able to party like an animal, but before you get there, do keep in mind that building a business takes a lot of hard work, long hours, pivots, dedication and as Werdelin mentioned, durability and resilience – so don’t neglect building that moat. Keep in mind that a donkey is basically a beast of burden and make no mistake about it: should you decide to go this route, you are going to need to work your ass off. Onward and forward.