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.“

The mall is making a comeback.

As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

The idea itself is simple, if not novel. But its arrival now feels more timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands.

That challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies like Tom Ford and Karla Otto. At her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker spotted a larger issue in the fashion and marketing space.

“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] emails for newsletters, and trying to be able to track brands and piece all that information together in real time,” Konsker said. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.

Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founders circle in Los Angeles.

“We were both super aligned on creating this world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet,” noted Halder. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Spotify — and they’ve created these databases for all of those creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion, and shopping, didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.

The pair founded The Mall in October 2025, with a focus on bringing together fashion brands under one digital roof.

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs, and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users to via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up, which allows them to immediately track any changes. While The Mall’s current database includes more than 10,000 brands, consumers can add any other brand they want, simply by sharing the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.)

On the back end, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to label everything it pulls into its system, which allows users to search for specific products and drops.

When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check out. There’s no traditional affiliate model involved here, the company says. Instead, The Mall is meant to work more as a discovery tool.

As users build their collections of brands, they can choose to have them discoverable by others or kept private. The founders see the potential for this to work as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense.

“As you dig in, you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole and finding more and more things from brands that you never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you,” Konsker noted.

Users can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives to specific products, she said. “You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little bit lower or higher in different colorways,” Konsker added.

The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan.

“Over time, we see those two paths crossing, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and…weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed,” Halder said.

This B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. Data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated. It doesn’t contain personal details, the founders confirmed.

The Mall has been in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and is now launching on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. (If you know someone with access, they can invite you. There isn’t a set number of invites per user.)

The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. The app is currently a free download on the App Store.