Great entrepreneurs are fundamentally lazy, and that's what makes them great.

Obviously we are all taught to work smart, not work hard ever since we started in our careers. But my favorite corollary to that in fast company management has always been “If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person. They’ll find the easiest way to get it done." This has never rung truer than it does today.

The rise of AI tools is turbocharging the founder’s “strategic laziness,” making the slog of startup life a thing of the past for those resourceful (read: lazy) enough to take full advantage.
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The Virtue of Entrepreneurial Laziness

For decades, the startup grind was lionized: all-night coding marathons, frantic deadlines for MVP releases, and the endless fundraising circuit. But the best founders never confused effort with impact. What sets apart an iconic founder isn’t their tolerance for misery. It’s their relentless obsession with finding the shortcut that gets results faster, cheaper, and with less sweat.

The so-called “lazy” entrepreneur is, in reality, ruthlessly efficient. This mindset isn’t just about ducking hard work. It’s a core mechanism for scalable success. Given enough tenacity, anyone can brute-force a solution… once. The legend is built by the founder who automates the solution so that it happens fast, repeatably, and with minimal human touch.

From Slog to Streamline with AI

Let’s talk practicalities. Founders used to lose weeks wrangling investor lists, writing endless variations of pitch decks, or manually onboarding new hires. Today, AI-powered tools make all of that look quaint:
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• Market Research: Want deep insights into competitors or customer sentiment? AI crawlers and chatbots deliver summary reports and actionable customer feedback while founders sleep.
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• Content Creation: Blog posts, social media updates, and even product descriptions once kept founders glued to their keyboards. Now, generative AI handles everything from initial drafts to rewriting in the founder’s voice, freeing up creative time for real strategic focus.
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• Onboarding and HR: AI automates documentation, training, and compliance. What once took days can be done in hours or minutes, with zero tedious paper-pushing.
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• Customer Support: Chatbots field Level 1 inquiries instantly, so founders don’t have to babysit support inboxes or pay for round-the-clock human help.
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• Expense Claims, Reporting, & Compliance: AI-driven analytics now make complex, manual reporting obsolete, giving founders instant, actionable financial visibility.

Those are but a handful of examples.

Working Smart: The New (Old) Startup Superpower

The entrepreneur’s job is not to do the maximum amount of work. It’s to build a business that runs itself. Founders who embrace their “laziness,” in the sense of constantly seeking a smarter, faster way, don’t just survive; they thrive. In a world overflowing with automation, the new “hard work” is finding what to automate next. Perhaps never to do the same task twice, manually.

If the startup hero of yesterday was the indefatigable grinder, today it’s the entrepreneur who asks, “How can I get this off my plate for good?” and lets AI do the heavy lifting. Smart, efficient, “lazy” entrepreneurship is the edge that lets founders conquer markets, scale faster, and sleep better at night.

In fact I'll go so far as to suggest that the most valuable co-founder you can find is something that is so expert at AI automation that they can make the rest of the team members more efficient by automatic everything they have to touch more than once.