The trust stack

Tim Ferriss said something at SXSW this week that I keep turning over in my head: “Trust and credibility will become a scarce resource.”

He was talking about creators and podcasts — about how AI-generated content is going to flood every channel, and the people who’ve built genuine relationships with their audiences will be the ones left standing. That’s true. But I think the insight is bigger than the creator economy. I think it describes a pattern that’s playing out everywhere right now, at every layer of the technology ecosystem.

Here’s the pattern: when technology commoditizes one layer of a market, the layer above it — the thing that used to be “nice to have” — becomes the actual product.

Start with venture capital. For decades, capital was the scarce resource. VCs existed to underwrite risk, and the relationship was basically transactional: here’s the money, call us at the liquidity event. Then AWS launched, GitHub arrived, Stripe made payments easy, and suddenly a product that cost $5 million to build in 2000 cost $500K by 2010. Capital was everywhere. Strong founders started choosing their investors instead of the other way around.

So what became the product? Value-add. YC, First Round, a16z — they all figured out that if capital is table stakes, you have to offer something above it. Introductions, recruiting help, operational support, brand. The firms that built that layer first now sit at the top of every founder’s list by default.

I was reading a piece today from Signature Block arguing that this exact same shift is now happening one layer up, at the LP level. Fund-of-funds are realizing that writing a check to an emerging manager isn’t enough anymore — the best managers are oversubscribed and choosing their LPs the way founders choose their VCs. So LPs need to provide value beyond capital too. The pattern repeats.

Now look at marketing. Rex Woodbury wrote a great piece this week called “Nothing Goes Viral by Accident,” about how AI is collapsing the cost of content creation and distribution. He describes “clipping” — armies of people (and increasingly AI) chopping long-form content into thousands of short-form variants, each optimized for a slightly different audience. The unit economics of producing ad creative are approaching zero. Anyone can flood any channel with personalized content.

So what becomes scarce? Woodbury nails it: narrative. When noise is free, the one-liner is everything. Harvey equals AI for law firms. That’s it. That’s the whole brand. The CMO’s job in 2026 isn’t to produce more content — it’s to protect the simplicity of the story while the distribution layer fragments into a thousand pieces underneath it.

I think you can apply this same lens to AI tools themselves. GeekWire ran a piece this week about the rise of vertical AI agents — tools built to do one job exceptionally well by combining foundation models with domain-specific data and workflows. The foundation models are available to everyone. Raw intelligence is commoditized. What’s scarce is the context, the domain knowledge, the earned understanding of how a specific workflow actually works. Trust, again, one layer up.