Andrew Yang Urges Startups to Lower Cost of Living

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued in a TechCrunch interview that the next wave of startup opportunity lies in lowering the cost of living, not building AI. Yang told TechCrunch he was inspired by Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs -- a pharmacy that sells medications at cost -- and made a list of sectors where Americans systematically overpay: "housing, education, food, fuel, transportation, media, and wireless," he said. He launched Noble Mobile in September 2025 as his proof of concept: a mobile virtual network operator that charges below-market rates and returns money to customers who use less data. TechCrunch and The Next Web both reported Noble Mobile has "thousands and thousands" of customers and is generating "millions in revenue." TechCrunch reported Yang saying the company is unit-profitable per customer, with the margin shared back to subscribers.

Yang's argument connects to his long-running concern about AI-driven wage compression. Goldman Sachs estimated in April 2026 that AI automation is displacing roughly 16,000 US jobs per month net, per Fortune reporting. Yang told TechCrunch: "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 framed meeting basic needs cheaply as "a very rich vein of opportunity" -- a market-led complement to the UBI policy he championed in his 2020 presidential run. He noted that $50 in monthly savings, compounded over 40 years, could amount to $24,000, per TechCrunch.

Capital has not followed the thesis yet. Yang told TechCrunch an investor said directly: "Love you, Andrew, want to work with you -- if you could just make this an AI company, we'll invest." He pointed to other early examples in the category -- Cost Plus Drugs, Light Phone, and online grocer Misfits Markets -- as evidence thin-margin consumer rebate models can work at scale, but acknowledged the uphill battle against AI-first funding concentration.

Observers can track whether venture funding shifts toward low-margin consumer models that explicitly rebate margin to users; Noble Mobile's user-growth and publicly reported unit economics; and macro labor data on AI-driven entry-level wage compression. Goldman Sachs projected the 16,000 monthly displacement figure could rise to 22,000-28,000 by Q4 2026 as agentic AI scales, per Fortune, which would test Yang's thesis that a large enough consumer base will seek lower-cost basic goods and services.