Andrew Yang has a pitch for founders chasing the next big thing, and it runs in the opposite direction of almost everything Silicon Valley is funding right now. According to TechCrunch AI, speaking on a recent episode of the Equity podcast, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate argued that the richest opportunity left isn’t extracting more value from customers. It’s giving value back.
What stands out here is the timing. Yang is framing this as a direct response to AI, not a feel-good side quest.
The thesis: sell people their lives back, cheaper
Yang’s inspiration was Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, the startup that sells medication at cost. He made a list of what everyone spends money on: housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless. Then he picked one and built on it.
Last September he launched Noble Mobile, a budget carrier that charges a fraction of what traditional networks do and refunds customers who use less data. The business model is the message. The startup’s value proposition is literally the margin it hands back.
He’s not alone in the category. Yang points to Cost Plus Drugs, dumb-phone maker Light Phone, and grocery service Misfits Market as early signs of a real trend, per TechCrunch AI.
Why he thinks it matters now
Yang’s logic ties straight to AI’s effect on work. “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?'” he told TechCrunch AI. Meeting those needs “less expensively,” he says, is “a very rich vein of opportunity.”
This is the same instinct that drove his 2020 campaign, when he ran on Universal Basic Income as a fix for AI-driven job loss. He still backs UBI. But he’s grown skeptical that government will redistribute AI’s gains well, worrying it’ll just “plug a hole and do something not terribly productive.” So he’s testing whether the market can do what policy hasn’t: build a direct line between the money and the people.
The traction, and the catch
Noble Mobile has grown to “thousands and thousands” of customers and is pulling in “millions in revenue,” Yang said. It’s profitable per customer, and it shares those profits with subscribers to keep them around and get them talking.
The consumer math is easy to follow. Yang says the average customer saves about $50 a month. Invested and compounded over 40 years, that’s roughly $24,000.
The investor math is where it gets hard. Capital is piled into AI right now, and a thin-margin consumer business with a social mission is a tough sell. Yang shared a telling line from one investor:
“Love you, Andrew, want to work with you, if you could just make this an AI company, we’ll invest.”
That quote is the whole tension in one sentence. The money wants the supply side of the AI boom. Yang is building for the demand side, the consumers who still need spending power.
The bigger argument
Yang’s pitch to skeptical investors is partly self-interested on their behalf. Even the most extractive companies need customers who can afford to buy. “The value being concentrated in the hands of a handful of folks and firms is just bad for everybody,” he said. He noted some in Silicon Valley are coming around, if only because they “just don’t want to have to hire private security.”
It’s worth weighing the source. Yang’s UBI thesis lost the primary but aged well as a talking point. His business track record is thinner and newer, and Noble Mobile is early. Treat the prediction as a sharp read on a real gap, not proven gospel.
What to take from it
- If you build products, look at the seven categories Yang listed. The opening is a transparent, give-back model in a sector that’s used to hiding fees.
- If you invest, watch whether consumer buying power becomes a thesis of its own as AI pressures wages.
- For everyone else, the framing is useful: as AI compresses income, the cost side of your budget becomes the lever you actually control.
The next few years will test whether “cheaper” can be a venture-scale business or stays a mission project. Yang is betting it’s the former. You can read the full conversation at the original source.