HBR: AI Is Changing the Rules of Entrepreneurship

The Harvard Business Review article sits in the publication's Entrepreneurship section, written by Victor P. Seidel, Bret Greenstein, and Thomas H. Davenport and dated Sep 09, 2026. Its framing is a break with the past: the era of lean start-ups, the article says, is behind us.

What replaces it, in the article's telling, is abundance — and abundance brings its own challenges. That pairing matters because it treats the shift not as a straightforward upgrade for founders but as a change in the problems they face. The same issue of the publication also carries a conversation with Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer on scaling a winning culture, alongside case studies on a luxury automaker's subscription program and on building brands for AI search.

The stakes hinge on whether entrepreneurs read the end of the lean start-up era as a call to rewrite how they build and grow, rather than as a slogan. The article's own claim — that abundance is itself a source of difficulty — is the point readers are likely to weigh against their own experience.