Startups can fail faster thanks to AI, says Salesforce exec — Capital Brief

It’s a Silicon Valley truism that entrepreneurs need to fail several times before finding success. The chief commercial officer of Slack says AI will accelerate this process — by allowing startups to fail much faster.

“It’s an old trope that if you’re going to fail, fail fast and fail forward, but it is true,” said Peter Doolan, chief customer office at Salesforce-owned Slack. “If the cost of capital to build a company is too high, you never get that third, fourth, fifth, seventh attempt.”

Doolan says AI agents — like those created by Salesforce — are making it significantly cheaper for startups to build minimum viable products. These AI tools can handle work that once required expensive extra hires, meaning startups can now test product-market fit with far less time and money.

“We will create companies and jobs that will never have made it because the cost of the previous bar was so high for those companies to finally either meet their product-market fit or not… and if it doesn’t work, then the [lower] opportunity cost allows them to restart again and again,” he said.