Jobs, Bezos, Elon and now you

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You know how people talk about wanting to catch the next big thing—like what Musk or Bezos did before everyone else caught on?

This is one of those moments.

The next wave isn’t about flashier ads or a better website—it’s about building your own digital team of smart agents that go out, win deals, and get business done while you focus on what matters.

The real advantage? If you jump in now, you’ll be the one everyone else chases for the next ten years.

The internet is about to move from being a stage for attention to a marketplace for intelligence.

Website as a Billboard Era

When the first wave of the internet arrived in the late 1990s, the opportunity was simple: visibility. Having a website meant your company had “arrived” on the digital frontier. Businesses built static pages—essentially online brochures—to tell the world who they were and what they sold.

From 1995 to 2000, the number of websites exploded from 23,500 to over 17 million. The incentive was clear: if people could find you online, you could attract entirely new markets.

Advantages businesses gained in Web 1.0:

• 24/7 presence: Companies went from physical storefronts to always-on marketing machines. This was revolutionary for distribution and trust.

• Early discovery advantage: Businesses that claimed digital real estate early—like Amazon, Dell, and eBay—dominated their verticals before competitors even logged on.

• Lower cost of information: Brochures, catalogs, and mailers became obsolete overnight. Updates were free and global.

• SEO as the first growth hack: The early optimization game was simple but powerful. Ranking on search engines was the difference between anonymity and success.

Still, Web 1.0 was a one-way street. Businesses talked; customers listened. The web was static and silent. It was a mirror of the physical world—a digital front window, but not yet a relationship.

The Feed Economy

Then came the social web. Around 2005, businesses learned the page wasn’t enough—you needed presence in the feed.

Web 2.0 introduced user-generated content, social connections, and algorithmic discovery. Suddenly, the best-performing businesses weren’t the ones with the best websites, but the ones that mastered growth loops through content and community.

Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn turned attention into a currency. If Web 1.0 was about being found, Web 2.0 was about being shared.

For B2B companies, this period redefined the buyer’s journey. Decision-makers no longer waited for trade shows—they followed thought leaders, discovered products through peers, and ran side-by-side product comparisons on review platforms.

Key advantages businesses gained in Web 2.0:

• Two-way interaction: Customer feedback turned into a growth engine. Engagement became quantifiable.

• Organic reach: Smart content could scale without paid spend. Early adopters of LinkedIn or YouTube gained millions of impressions essentially for free.

• Hyper-targeted paid channels: The advent of Facebook Ads (2007) and Google AdWords (2000) made it possible to reach customers by intent (search) or identity (social).

• Visual storytelling: Rich media—video, memes, and carousel posts—became tools for persuasion. The design aesthetic was the brand.

But with it came noise. Feeds saturated. Organic reach collapsed. And “personalization” turned into pattern recognition—selling to customers who looked like last week’s buyers, not necessarily those who valued your solution most.

We traded discovery for distraction.

The Age of Agents

Now, the internet is transitioning again—from social connection to autonomous collaboration.

In Web 3.0, the core interaction isn’t between humans scrolling feeds—it’s between agents acting on behalf of their humans.

This new layer is defined by:

• Data-rich automation that interprets user intent, not surface-level behavior.

• Generative AI that can initiate conversations, negotiate prices, send invoices, or close contracts autonomously.

• Business decisions made faster, with information symmetry baked in.

Think of it like this: if Web 1.0 was the directory, and Web 2.0 was the conversation, Web 3.0 is the coordination.

In this shift, business gets redefined.

• A freelance designer’s agent can now discover new clients, generate proposals, submit bids, and close deals—while they sleep.

• A procurement agent in a manufacturing firm can price-compare suppliers, evaluate ESG scores, and generate contract drafts in seconds.

• A marketing ops agent can autonomously test new ad campaigns, monitor profitability, and pause unproductive spend—without waiting for a human dashboard review.

The new economy isn’t about content creation; it’s about task delegation.

From Performance Marketing to Performance Intelligence

In previous eras, business growth required storytelling. You needed to convince people through well-designed landing pages, videos, and brand aesthetics.

With agents, persuasion gets replaced by verification. The question shifts from “Can you convince me?” to “Can your agent prove it?”

Agents operate with APIs, not opinions. They evaluate value propositions quantitatively—price, reliability, integration ease, uptime metrics. Context—once the marketer’s territory—now becomes computable.

Example:

Imagine a SaaS founder targeting other startups for an automation product.

• In the Web 2.0 world, they’d run ads, publish case studies, and hope potential buyers stumble into their funnel.

• In the Web 3.0 world, their agent lists their offer in an “agent economy.” Other agents—those serving finance, ops, or RevOps functions—query the network for best-fit vendors and automatically shortlist the SaaS product based on ROI metrics. Humans get the shortlist, not the search result.

This is discovery without the scroll.

The Stripping Away of Performance Facades

Web 3.0 will eliminate one of the defining features of Web 2.0: performative branding.

In the agent-driven world, aesthetics, ad creative, and clickbait headlines matter far less. Agents don’t get emotionally influenced by a cinematic video or witty caption; they optimize for utility, reliability, and price-performance ratio.

This means misinformation, influencer bias, and entertainment-based marketing lose their grip.

Real value becomes visible in data. Transparency rewards substance.

Businesses that used to grow by “being loud” will struggle. Those that quietly built rock-solid value will win.

How Discovery Really Changes

The invisible work of search optimization, ad bidding, and funnel design gets replaced by a new discipline: agent optimization.

Instead of optimizing for keywords or impressions, businesses optimize for compatibility—ensuring their data, APIs, and terms can be read, understood, and actioned by other agents.

Today’s version of “ranking on Google” will become “being prioritized by agents.”

For example:

• SaaS teams will publish agent-accessible product data (price models, SLAs, success metrics).

• Agents will compare trust scores and contract outcomes rather than CTRs and MQLs.

• Partners will automate integrations through mutual authentication rather than endless onboarding calls.

In short, the surface web fades into the background. The machine-readable web rises to the front.

The Human Layer: What Still Matters

If agents trade data and make deals, where do humans fit? Everywhere that requires trust, empathy, or strategic vision.

Humans still:

• Define goals and ethics for agents.

• Interpret ambiguous signals (why growth matters, not just how).

• Design new incentives—pricing, community, culture—that agents can’t predict.

As one investor at a16z recently noted, “Agents won’t remove humans from work; they’ll remove work from humans.”

This is the defining opportunity for founders and operators: design systems where your agents perform the operations, while you focus on alignment and strategy.

How Businesses Should Prepare

The agent era won’t arrive all at once. It’ll show up unevenly—first in B2B workflows, finance, procurement, and growth operations. But the playbook is starting to take shape.

Here’s where forward-leaning teams are already investing:

• Agent-ready data: Inventory and product metadata are being structured to be readable by autonomous agents.

• API-first ecosystems: Businesses are turning every service into a callable function. If a human can click it, an agent should be able to trigger it.

• Value transparency: Teams are documenting metrics and credentials publicly (think uptime dashboards, billing reliability, pricing models).

• Ethical alignment: As agents begin making decisions, companies are defining the boundary conditions—what’s acceptable automation versus what stays human.

The Revenue Model Rewrite

Just as Web 2.0 made engagement the dominant metric, Web 3.0 will replace it with efficiency.

Where you once optimized for click-through rate, you’ll now optimize for completion rate—how often your agents successfully transact with others.

Revenue operations will become code-driven.

Instead of sales teams chasing inbound leads or running outbound sequences, autonomous agents will:

• Match leads to ideal account personas via shared data models.

• Negotiate standardized contracts through escrowed API systems.

• Trigger invoices and payment verification automatically.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) could drop by 70% for highly compatible systems. The “cold email” might disappear entirely, replaced by agent messaging saying, “my user’s use case aligns with yours—shall we transact?”

This is growth without friction.

The Paradox of Automation

The irony is that as everything becomes more autonomous, differentiation will once again depend on something deeply human: taste.

Because when everything becomes efficient, the scarce resource becomes meaning.

The best founders won’t be the ones who automate the most; they’ll be the ones who define why their system exists and how it aligns with human values. They’ll decide which parts of the loop stay autonomous—and which stay deliberately inefficient to preserve authenticity.

In an agent economy, your mission and model will become your signature.

The New Frontier

If Web 1.0’s rallying cry was “get online,” and Web 2.0’s was “go viral,” then Web 3.0’s mantra is “delegate intelligently.”

We’re entering an internet where the default participant isn’t a human looking for attention—it’s an agent looking for alignment.

Businesses that embrace this shift early won’t just capture efficiency; they’ll redefine what customer relationships even mean.

You won’t need to entertain to sell. You won’t need to push to persuade. You’ll win by designing the most aligned, useful, and discoverable system for the agents doing business on your behalf.

The web started as a place to be found. Then a place to be followed.
Now, it’s about being understood—by agents fluent in your value.

How will you take down Goliath and become this Generations Jobs, Besos or Musk?
-Grady

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