America at 250: The Best Place to Build What Doesn't Exist Yet

Today America turns 250. A quarter of a millennium of an idea that was radical when it was written and is still radical now: that people get to decide their own future, and that the new thing deserves a chance. I have spent my whole career inside that idea, so this anniversary lands personally.

Every July 4th, my neighborhood in the Bay Area fills with the smell of grills and the crackle of fireworks after dark. My family and friends add our own layer to it. Our table usually has burgers next to curry, noodles, and tacos, and nobody thinks that combination is strange. That, to me, is the whole point of this country.

I did not grow up here, but I did grow up here as a builder. I got my education at a university here. I spent my first couple of years working, learning how technology actually ships, how a business runs, how you grow a company, and how you earn the trust of real customers. That was the apprenticeship. America did not hand me a shortcut. It gave me something better: a place to learn by doing, a market that rewards you for being early, and a culture that does not punish you for being wrong.

You are allowed to name new things here

The first time I tested this, I was inventing and building a customer identity platform (CIAM). Customer identity was not a category back then. It was a feature buried inside IT budgets, something companies bolted on and forgot. I spent years arguing that customer identity deserved its own name, its own budget line, and its own vendors. The market eventually agreed. CIAM became a category, and the platform I built grew to serve over a billion user identities.

Here is what I learned from that decade: category creation is not a marketing exercise. It is a bet that the world has changed faster than the language describing it. America is one of the few places where that bet pays off, because buyers here are willing to purchase something that did not exist eighteen months ago. Try selling a brand-new category to a procurement committee in most other markets. You will spend three years explaining what it is before anyone signs.

Doing it again

Right now I am making the same bet a second time with GrackerAI. Search is being rebuilt in front of us. Buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for vendor recommendations before they ever touch a Google results page. The companies that show up in those AI answers win the pipeline. The ones that do not are invisible, no matter how good their SEO was in 2021.

Generative Engine Optimization is not a household term yet. Neither was CIAM in 2012. That is exactly why I am building it.

And this is the part that feels distinctly American to me. Nobody here asked why a founder who already built one company would risk starting over in an unproven category. The question I get instead is "how fast can you move?" Investors take the meeting. Early customers sign because the thesis makes sense, not because a legacy brand vouches for it. The system is wired to give new ideas a fair hearing.

AI just changed the speed limit

Look at what is happening on the frontier. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is closing in on a trillion-dollar valuation roughly five years after it started, with revenue that went from about a billion to a $47 billion run rate in a single year. OpenAI is not far behind. SpaceX, now merged with xAI, is being valued past a trillion dollars while it reshapes both space and intelligence. These are not slow, decade-long climbs. This is compounding at a speed the software industry has never seen, and AI is the engine.

That matters for every builder, not just the giants. The cost of trying an idea has collapsed. What took a full team a year now takes a small group a week. AI is the new growth accelerant, and the next few years will change how we use and consume technology as completely as the smartphone did. I have written more about where I think this goes in my future tech notes, but the short version is simple: the gap between an idea and a shipped product is closing fast, and that rewards the people willing to move first.

Opportunity is infrastructure

People talk about the American Dream like it is a feeling. I think of it as infrastructure. It is the ability to incorporate a company in a day. It is a patent system that let an immigrant founder file and hold patents in AI and security. It is universities that invite outsiders in and teach them how to build. I help, advise, and mentor many students, entrepreneurs, and founders, and half the teams I work with have a story that started somewhere else on the map. It is a customer base large enough that a niche, like GEO for B2B cybersecurity companies, can still be a real business.

None of this is an accident. It is 250 years of compounding decisions that made building things the default setting.

My family carries two cultural heritages, Indian and Chinese, and I have watched innovation ecosystems grow around the world. Many are impressive, and more will rise. But the specific combination America offers, capital plus talent plus a market that buys new categories plus a legal system that protects what you invent, is still unmatched. That is not politics. That is just an operator's read of the terrain.

Building the community, not just the product

The other thing I am building is people. I am putting real energy into a community around AI: helping people actually use it effectively, not just talk about it, and helping them learn the digital identity and IAM ecosystem. That knowledge is not optional anymore. It is becoming the foundation of both cybersecurity and AI, and the people who understand it will shape what comes next. Categories are useful, but communities compound. A product serves a market. A community teaches one to build.

What comes next

Software has one non-negotiable law now: growth. And AI just made growth cheaper and faster to earn than at any point in my career. So I am not stopping at one product. New things are coming, built on the same instinct that named CIAM and now GEO: see the shift early, give it a name, ship it before the market has the words for it. I will be adding new products to my stack soon, powered by AI, because the cost of trying has never been lower and the reward for being first has never been higher.

What I owe back

Gratitude without output is just sentiment. The way I honor what this country gave me is simple: keep building. Ship the product. Grow the community. Teach the founders coming up behind me. Create the category, and when it matures, create the next one.

My kid will grow up watching fireworks every July 4th without knowing, for a while, how rare this setup is. One day I will explain it: this is a place where the new thing gets a chance. Where a founder can be wrong, learn, and go again. Where the answer to "who gave you permission to build that?" is that nobody needed to.

Two hundred and fifty years in, that promise still holds, and AI is about to prove it all over again. Happy Independence Day!