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TL;DR
Yang says AI will compress wages and the opportunity is startups that lower living costs. Noble Mobile gives money back. Investors only want AI companies.
Andrew Yang thinks the biggest startup opportunity of the next decade is not building AI. It is lowering the cost of living for the people AI is about to displace. In a TechCrunch interview, the former presidential candidate and UBI advocate laid out a thesis: as AI compresses wages and eliminates entry-level jobs, the market opportunity shifts to companies that make basic needs cheaper.
“AI is going to suck up a lot of the value and the jobs, and then Americans are going to look up and say, ‘How do I meet basic needs?‘” Yang said. He sees “a very rich vein of opportunity” in startups that bring down costs in housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless.
Yang’s proof of concept is Noble Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator he launched last September. It sells cell service at a fraction of traditional carrier prices and gives customers money back if they use less data. The company has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is generating “millions in revenue.” It is unit profitable per customer.
The model was inspired by Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which sells pharmaceuticals at cost plus a flat markup. Yang sees both companies as early examples of an emerging category where the value proposition is the margin the startup gives back, not the margin it extracts. Misfits Market (discounted groceries) and Light Phone (minimalist hardware) fit the same pattern.
“We’re unit profitable per customer, but we just share the profits with our subscribers with the idea that it’ll make you happy, you’ll stay around, and maybe you’ll tell your friends and family,” Yang said.
The challenge is capital. Investors want AI companies, not consumer-facing businesses with thin margins and social missions. “I had at least one investor say to me around Noble Mobile, ‘Love you, Andrew, want to work with you if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest,’” Yang said. The workforce displacement Yang warned about in 2020 is now showing up in data: Goldman Sachs estimated 16,000 US jobs lost to AI per month, and entry-level workers are absorbing the most damage.
Yang is still an advocate for universal basic income but is less confident the government will deliver it. “There is room for a direct connection between the money and the people,” he said. Where policy fails, market incentives can step in. A $50 monthly saving, invested and compounded over 40 years, amounts to $24,000, enough for a retirement down payment.
The thesis is contrarian in a venture market that has poured $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone. But Yang’s argument has an uncomfortable logic to it: even the most extractive companies need consumers with enough buying power to buy their products. “The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. “There are some folks I know in Silicon Valley who are open to that for a variety of reasons, like they just don’t want to have to hire private security.“
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