The future technology company won't look like a startup. It will look like Dior.
Your startup is a fashion house. You just don't know it yet.
By Jack Cantillon, co-founder and Partner at Green Room. I’m a Dublin-based first-cheque investor. We back Europe’s most exceptional individuals before they become founders.
It’s a Friday evening on the 17th November 2023 in beautiful Malibu. Joshua Kushner is sitting with Rick Rubin discussing intuition. OpenAI’s board fire Sam Altman. Joshua steps out. Sees twenty missed calls. Returns to his hotel and leads a five-day crisis effort that ultimately reinstated Altman.
There’s a seducing notion that AI will make execution free, leaving taste as the only differentiator. We’ll all become like Rubin, offering refined judgment from our abundant table. I hate to say it but I don’t think generational founders will soon look like sedentary Yodas. They’ll look more like Kushner, the person you’d call when facing career defining chaos.
Founders will still need to create, just at unprecedented, uncomfortable speed. As software’s marginal cost approaches zero, we’re entering a world of unrelanting creative destruction. Here’s why the future of technology will resemble a fashion house more than a hacker house. Buckle up.
The most interesting builder in the world is a fashion designer
At Green Room, I like to ask people: "If you were stuck in trouble in a foreign country in an impossible situation, who is the person you'd call?" It's how we try to identify the person in someone's network with the most creativity and agency. The kind of person who builds category-defining companies. I don't have his number, but I'd like to call a man called Jonathan Anderson.
Jonathan Anderson was born in Magherafelt, a rural village of fewer than 10,000 people in Northern Ireland1. He flirted with attending Juilliard at a young age but found his first job in fashion at 18 in Brown Thomas in Dublin. He launched his own label, JW Anderson, in 2008 at the age 24. Just 5 years later, LVMH made him creative director of Loewe, a Spanish leather goods house that nobody under 40 was thinking about. In just over a decade, he grew that business sevenfold and turned it into a billion-dollar cultural force.
In 2025, Dior (majority owned by LVMH but with distinct operations) made him creative director of women’s, men’s and haute couture, anointing him the most influential fashion designer of the decade. The first person to hold all three since Christian Dior himself. He still runs JW Anderson. He still collaborates with Uniqlo. He manages around 20 new collections a year, an endless cycle of creative destruction. He represents what a generational technology founder will soon look like.
This is taste operating at the velocity of a fighter pilot.
What is a fashion house?
A fashion house like Dior works like this. One creative director sets the vision across everything. Beneath them sit the ateliers, the skilled craftspeople who can turn a sketch into a finished garment in days. Around them sit the commercial teams, the supply chain, the retail network, the communications people who amplify the story. The creative director does not do all of this work. But they touch all of it. Every collection is a new product launch. Every season is a new bet. The house provides the infrastructure, the brand, the distribution, the institutional memory. The creative director provides the point of view. When it works, the result is a billion-dollar business that reinvents itself multiple times a year while remaining unmistakably itself.
Software is entering the world fashion already lives in
Fashion has always operated in this world of constant creative destruction. What you showed last season is history. There is no compounding product moat. There is only the next collection.
Software is entering that world now. Your last product is a reference and a lesson, not a moat and a bottom line.
It makes me think of Cursor. As the underlying models commoditises, Cursor cannot win on the engine. It wins on the experience layer, the integration, the feel. That is brand in the truest sense. It forces an outlier CEO like Michael Truell to operate more like a creative director than a traditional software CEO. High-frequency product judgment calls across the entire surface area.
Aditya Agarwal and Elad Gil made a similar point recently at South Park Commons. They believe the SaaS playbook is broken and the single-product startup is dead. Incumbent reaction times have compressed from five years to five months. AI lets small teams ship multiple integrated products from day one. Their conclusion is that today’s founders need to move with unnatural velocity to survive.
That sounds a lot like running a fashion house.
The Brand Age meets the build age
Paul Graham published an essay this month called The Brand Age. His argument: when technology commoditises the differences between products, brand is what remains. He uses Swiss watches as his case study. When quartz killed accuracy as a differentiator, the survivors stopped being precision instrument makers and became luxury brands.
He also identifies a tension that matters here. Branding is centrifugal. It pushes toward differentiation. Design is centripetal. It pulls toward the right answer. The two are opposed.
Jonathan Anderson lives inside that tension every day. Every collection has to be recognisably Dior, yet fresh, and it also has to sell. He holds that contradiction together at industrial scale, repeatedly, 20 times a year. That is rapidly becoming the job of the technology founder in the brand age. Taste and speed, held in tension, at volume.
Only four jobs left in the building
So who is left in the building?
Yoni Rechtman of Slow Ventures has a framework I like. He says there are basically only four jobs left at tech companies. The high-velocity generalist who ships product. The security and infrastructure people who keep it stable. The “hot” people in sales and CX who present an easy experience to the world. And the grown-ups who say “hey, come on” when an accelerating organisation needs a governor (think lawyers, compliance and your board).
Jonathan Anderson is job one. The high-velocity creative director shipping collection after collection. His ateliers and supply chain are job two. The infrastructure that turns a sketch into a garment and gets it to every city without the machine catching fire. His store teams are job three. And Bernard Arnault2, the CEO of LVMH, is job four. The grown-up keeping the creative director honest.
If you are designing a faster car, you need better brakes. The importance of a grown-up in the room does not diminish as the creative engine accelerates. It increases.
The LVMH model
Here is the part I keep coming back to.
LVMH is the most valuable luxury group in the world. Its model is deceptively simple. Centralise the power players. Give them resources and autonomy. Let that concentration of creative talent produce multiple brands across multiple verticals.
Bernard Arnault does not design handbags. He identifies the Jonathan Andersons. He puts them in the right house. He gives them the ateliers, the supply chain and the global infrastructure. Then he gets out of the way.
I wonder if this is where technology is heading. Not a world of solo founders on couches with good taste and an AI co-pilot. A world of LVMH-style organisations where a creative director with extreme velocity and genuine product sense sits at the centre, surrounded by those remaining roles. Shipping relentlessly and destroying what went before.
Velocity plus taste
You may have no interest in fashion but yet even you cannot escape Jonathan Anderson’s velocity of creation.
Artificial, in which Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, is the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film that covers those very days in November 2023. The story that began with Joshua Kushner sitting with Rick Rubin talking about intuition and ended with a five-day war to reinstate the CEO of OpenAI. The costumes for that story are being designed by the man I think best represents where technology leadership is heading. Knowing him - he will win an Oscar for Sam’s grey t-shirts.
The fashion house is the new startup. The creative director is the new founder. If you’re trying to find that generational talent, the question is not whether they have taste. That is becoming table stakes. It is whether they can move fast enough to use it.
Who are you going to call?
Ireland's greatest poet, Seamus Heaney, was born four miles down the road in Bellaghy. In accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature he said: "Getting started, keeping going, getting started again. In art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival."
Europe’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $145B.