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Tokens: The New Oil
What happens when demand exceeds supply? A 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract Perspective
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Last month, you were checking your bank balance every morning, calculating runway down to the day. "If we don't find product-market fit by July, we're dead."
This morning, you checked your OpenAI dashboard instead. You’re burning $50,000 a week in tokens. Your growth curve looks like a rocket launch. And you're going to hit your API limits in six days.
“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.” — Pogo
Whiplash
This is what success looks like. While you were exploring you optimized for cheap experiments. Less time, less money, more chances of survival. Now your hair is on fire. It’s time to shift gears.
Then last Tuesday happened. Some influencer posted about you. Your quiet little AI experiment went from 200 users to 20,000 users. Now it's doubling every three days.
Your cofounders are ecstatic. Your investors are throwing money at you. And you’re staring at the Graph of Death:
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.Welcome to success. The only thing worse is failure.
Welcome to Your New Normal
This is your new job: seeing these kinds of cross-overs in time & doing just enough to dodge them. There’s good news:
You don’t have to solve these problems, just push them out into the indefinite future.
You have access to capital on a new scale to buy your way out of these problems.
There’s bad news:
If you don’t manage to push this problem out into the future, it will kill you.
Your instincts from the past 12 months are exactly wrong.
Once you push this problem into the future a new one will arise.
Remember being proud when you could get an answer for a hypothesis for one tenth the cost? When you had that elegant queueing system that ensured fair usage?
Forget all of it. Those were exploration habits. You're in expansion now. Different game, different rules, different ways to die.
Your new reality:
That sustainable architecture you planned? Too late. Usage patterns have shifted & it’s already obsolete.
That token optimization project? Too slow. Time is now money in a newly existential way.
That careful cost management? No longer relevant. Once you’re airborne, you’re suddenly immune to the length of the runway.
You have days, not months. Time to break some things.
The Only Graph That Matters
Let’s say you’re a supplier of tokens (the same logic works if you’re a consumer, but you’ll need to translate). Graph:
Supply: How many tokens you can consume & generate?
Demand: How many tokens your users are supplying & expecting?
Where they cross, your product dies. Not "degrades." Dies.
Remember—this is success. This is what you worked so hard for. So, now what do you do? Good news: you have 2 levers.
Kicking the Can Down the Road
Lever 1—bend supply up. Do what you need to do to survive. I heard stories from early Facebook of engineers going to Fry’s at lunch, buying servers, racking & stacking, & keeping the site up for one more day of peak usage. Efficient? No. Better than the alternative? Oh yes.
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Lever 2—bend demand down.
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Optimization is useful, if it can be achieved quickly (remember, time is now lots of money).
Delete expensive-but-not-critical features. I know this is hard. You love everything you built. Better to survive today & reimplement tomorrow.