AI Moves Entrepreneurship From Capital-Intensive to Agency-Intensive

By Daniel Okafor

A 10-year-old with a laptop can now develop software, experiment with artificial intelligence and create applications without financial backing, formal education or membership in an organization, according to Howard Lieberman’s column in The Berkshire Edge.

Lieberman, a Juilliard-trained composer, argues that AI is moving entrepreneurship from capital-intensive to agency-intensive. The column includes “Getting Calibrated,” an original improvisation by him.

What changed in the economics of starting?

Lieberman begins with a concern about a small group of technology billionaires who command extraordinary wealth, power, companies, computing infrastructure and influence. Ordinary people can appear unable to compete. In his account, many creators began without those resources, driven first by imagination, agency and determination.

Entrepreneurship predates venture capital, stock markets and modern corporations by thousands of years, Lieberman writes. People created things, exchanged goods and services, organized enterprises and supported themselves long before formal financial institutions.

Even 50 years ago, he says, people could open shops, establish professional practices, manufacture products and provide services using their own labor, modest savings, borrowed resources and customer revenue. Venture capital was one financing mechanism for enterprises requiring substantial resources or rapid growth, not a requirement to start.

What has changed, according to Lieberman, is the sophistication and scale of capabilities people can mobilize without investors. AI does more than lower the cost of familiar work; it lets individuals attempt activities that previously required organizations, specialized personnel or substantial capital.

Why did capital arrive later?

Lieberman says many technology billionaires began without enormous financial resources or institutional power. Their early assets were imagination, agency and determination, although their backgrounds ranged from privilege and prestigious education to college dropouts and unconventional careers.

Some sought independence rather than money. Others wanted to solve problems, invent products, create music or pursue ideas that established organizations did not understand. Over his career, he says, he has known entrepreneurs, inventors and artists who were not primarily motivated by money. In his view, entrepreneurship expressed agency before it became an economic strategy.

Lieberman also notes that artists can sustain work that may never produce a substantial financial return. Creative people often commit extraordinary energy to bringing something into existence. Money may sustain that work, and financial success sometimes follows, but neither need be the original motive.

Lieberman summarizes the historical sequence: “Capital did not invent entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship created opportunities for capital.”

What did Lieberman’s own path show?

Lieberman says he started his first business at 13, without thinking about venture capital, billion-dollar valuations or building an enormous corporation. He wanted to do something for himself and found that he could.

At graduate school, he considered acoustics, semiconductor chip design and Fourier optics. He chose acoustics partly because it was less capital-intensive, allowing experiments and independent inquiry without semiconductor fabrication or advanced optical infrastructure.

That choice also protected his autonomy. Lower capital needs meant less dependence on institutional permission, organizational politics and somebody else’s priorities, while capital remained an enabling resource rather than the driving force.

Investors later slid checks across tables, Lieberman says. He describes that money as a bet on his imagination, experience, judgment and agency, rather than a simple purchase of equipment or an operating budget.

How does AI multiply individual capacity?

Lieberman describes the mechanism this way: “I think of AI as the tool maker’s toolmaker.” Unlike a conventional tool, he says, AI can help people conceive, design, develop, test and improve other tools, amplifying their capacity to create capabilities rather than merely operate existing ones.

Lieberman lists tools that individuals can now access:

• Software development tools
• Cloud computing
• Computer-aided design
• Digital publishing
• Professional-quality audio and video production
• Prototype manufacturing

He says people can access these capabilities at costs that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. A child may lack experience, but imagination and agency can begin operating immediately without waiting for backing or formal training.

He is not chiefly interested in efficiency or imitation. He wants to do things he has never done before, including things that may never have been done by anyone, across his work as a musician, composer, improviser, scientist, engineer, entrepreneur and innovator.

For Lieberman, AI is not primarily a labor-saving device. It is a nonlinear multiplier of his ability to imagine, investigate, integrate and create, allowing combinations that previously would have required substantial organizations, specialized personnel or financial resources.

What do imagination and agency contribute?

Lieberman draws a distinction between the two. Agency without imagination does not necessarily produce innovation, since an active, disciplined person can pursue conventional goals. Imagination conceives possibilities; agency enables action on them.

Money can buy computing power, equipment, expertise and access to AI, according to Lieberman. Those purchases do not automatically supply an original conception, a compelling purpose or the determination to bring something new into existence.

His operating sequence is simple: agency initiates action, technology provides leverage, and capital supplies additional resources when needed. The wider wealth of a person includes curiosity, imagination, experience, judgment, relationships and agency, none of which bank balances capture.

A person with substantial money but little imagination may accomplish less than a modestly funded person with creative capacity and agency. Lieberman does not dismiss capital, particularly for work requiring physical infrastructure; AI instead changes the resources needed to begin.

What does the shift not mean?

Lieberman rejects three broad conclusions: financial capital has become irrelevant, economic inequality has disappeared, and imagination with agency guarantees financial success. His narrower claim is that people who feel powerless beside enormous technology wealth may overlook capabilities they already possess.

Many of today’s technology billionaires started as creative outliers with ideas they wanted to pursue, while their wealth and institutional power developed later. Independent creators now can access capabilities that would have seemed almost unimaginable to many of those founders when they began.

He also separates the sequence: entrepreneurship predates venture capital, while imagination and agency predate formal entrepreneurship. He rejects the idea that lack of money leaves an aspiring creator without a way forward.

Lieberman says people do not need to become wealthy before they begin. They must identify what they want to accomplish, investigate the capabilities available to them and start exercising their agency.

The most consequential outcome, he argues, may not be more billionaires. It may be more people being able to afford independence, pursue meaningful objectives and participate in creating the world around them.

For independent creators, the practical frontier is whether expanding AI tools can turn imagination and agency into sustained work at lower cost. Lieberman calls those resources potentially among the most valuable forms of wealth, even when financial backing remains scarce.