Kevin Surace says Claude and other modern AI systems let two people build billion-dollar companies by handling design, code, and marketing. He's raised $42 million in Rochester despite the city lacking major venture capital, and sees students eager to launch AI startups that could outcompete established companies in ways that were impossible ten years ago.
You have individual people that can build a billion-dollar company today with one person at the helm.
Yeah.
Claude will build it all.
So why are we struggling to build that ecosystem in Rochester? We have absolutely no startup ecosystem, venture capitalists and private equity.
Actually, Rochester is better than most medium-sized cities, metropolitan areas, obviously save New York or Boston or Atlanta or something. But other than those, Rochester is actually a pretty good place. So I know all the venture capitalists that are local. Most of them have smaller funds. You know, they're meant to get things started here, but you're going to go to the West Coast for the big money. Yeah. There is some big money in town. I won't get into where that comes from, but I've raised $42 million in Rochester.
So it is possible to raise real money here if you have a real company and you have a real need and you're solving a real problem. It's not impossible.
I speak to the AI Club at RIT twice a year. Those kids want to build companies. That's all they want to do. They want to build, you know, 2-person companies that do all this stuff. And I think, you know, if I'm a larger company, I'm very worried about 2 kids in a garage with Claude beating me out of my own business because they can do that today and you couldn't do it 5 or 10 years ago.
