Built on Rented Land
A powerful new AI model got released and yanked back within two days, and it crystallized something I saw in every conversation this week: most people are building their businesses on land they don't own. Renting and owning feel identical, right up until the day they don't.
This week one of the big AI labs put out a genuinely impressive new model. The kind of thing the people who watch this stuff closely got excited about. And then, about two days later, it w=as gone. Pulled back over questions about who's allowed to use models that powerful.
I'm not here to argue whether that was the right call. What stuck with me was the feeling of watching it happen. For about forty-eight hours, people wired that model into their work and started depending on it. Then somebody flipped a switch, and it wasn't theirs anymore.
It was never theirs.
Once I felt that, I started seeing it everywhere this week. Underneath almost every conversation was the same question: do you actually own the thing you're building, or are you just renting it?
You already know this feeling, even if you've never thought about AI for a second. The photos that live in somebody's cloud, right up until you miss a payment. The music you "bought" that vanishes the day the app shuts down. The followers you spent three years building on a platform that can change the rules, throttle your reach, or shut you off tomorrow. You didn't own any of it. You were renting. You just never got a bill that looked like a bill.
In a business it gets sharper. I sat with a company this week, a real operation with trucks and routes and customers, and we wanted to pull their own data out of the old software that holds all their records. The vendor wanted something like thirty thousand dollars a year to let them do it in any automated way. Thirty grand a year to get at their own information, about their own customers, their own trucks.
That isn't a bug. That's the business model. A lot of software is built exactly that way on purpose: get your business in, get all your history in, get you good and dependent, and make leaving expensive. The data is the hostage. You don't see the bars on the cage until the day you try to walk out with what's already yours.
The barrier to building collapsed. You can stand up a website, a dashboard, a whole workflow in an afternoon now. I believe that more every single week. But there's a second half of that sentence I hadn't been saying clearly enough: the question isn't whether you can build it. It's whether you're building on ground you own, or ground you're renting.
The gold rush right now is everybody building fast. And almost all of it is going up on rented land. Rented models that get pulled. Rented platforms that change the rules whenever they want. Rented access to your own data. Whole operations sitting on one person's personal account. And it all feels like ownership, because it's working, and it's yours to use. Today.
But renting and owning feel exactly the same right up until the day they don't. Until the price changes. Until the model disappears in forty-eight hours. Until the one person who knew everything walks out the door.
So here's the unglamorous move we actually make now. When we build something for a company, we build it where they own it. On their account, that they control, that they can hand to the next person. If my whole team vanished tomorrow, the thing keeps running. That's the real test. Not "does it work when I'm in the room," but "does it keep working when I'm not."
And I'll be honest, because this is where the mirror got uncomfortable. This week I caught myself doing the exact thing I warn everybody about. That company with the trucks? When I first built their dashboard, fast, just to show them what was possible, I threw it up on my own personal account. And then I'm in a meeting later that same week, preaching about client ownership, and it hits me: the thing I'm pointing at as the right way to do it is sitting on my login. I'd become the vendor I was complaining about. Just nicer about it.
Nobody sets out to trap anybody. You're just moving fast, getting a win up on the board, and the easy thing and the right thing point in two different directions, and easy wins, quietly, while you're looking the other way. Nobody decides to build their house on sand. You just build where it's easy to build. And sand is real easy to build on.
There's that old story about two men who each built a house, one on sand and one on rock. From the outside, in good weather, they looked identical. Then the storm came, and only one of them was still standing. The houses looked exactly the same right up until the day the weather told the truth.
So build your business on ground you own. It matters more than it sounds like. But build your life on the rock, on the things nobody can pull back: faith, character, whether your word is good, how you treat people when nobody's watching. You don't rent those. Nobody can repossess them. And honestly, they're about the only thing you really get to hand down.
Build with the tools I trust → lvluplocal.com