Unlocking the 99%: Mindaugas Petrutis on Tools, Talent, and Human Potential

I knew I was talking to someone who actually cares. Someone who shows up even when they're tired. Someone who's thinking about the problem at 9:30 PM instead of sleeping.

I came to Mindaugas with a specific question. I'd just tried Lovable, this tool that lets you describe what you want to build and have it generate a functional prototype in minutes. I got goosebumps. And I wanted to know: what is this actually going to do to the world of design and product?

But first, I had to listen to what Mindaugas really believes the tool is for.

"There's only 1% of the world that could build something, and there's a 99% that couldn't," he said. "But the 1% just because they can build it doesn't mean they have the right ideas. The goal here is to unlock the other 99%."

He paused, and then he made something clear. This isn't about making everyone an entrepreneur. This is about reskilling. About giving people the ability to learn by doing. About proving to yourself and to others that you can build.

"Everybody's demanding AI skills," he said. "Use it to make something and then tell people about it, so the people who are hiring for those skills can find you."

I asked Mindaugas about his own path, because it seemed unconventional. It seemed like the exact opposite of the traditional trajectory.

"I'm a college dropper," he said simply. "I went to university for one year."

And then he told me something I keep coming back to: "Degree means nothing now. And the way I think about it, especially if we have some AI initiatives, the tech moves so fast right now that there's announcements literally multiple times every single day."

Think about the absurdity of that. You could graduate from a computer science program and be obsolete before you walk across the stage. The curriculum changes slower than the industry.

"The only way to know and survive in that scenario is to have been just using these tools every day," Mindaugas explained.

He told me about his graveyard of Lovable projects. Over 100 of them. He'd have an idea at breakfast, build it, and move on. Not to launch it. Not to monetize it. Just to learn.

"I was thinking about a pen pal that I had when I was in my teens, and I was like, 'Ooh, what if you could send a stranger a message on the internet. What would that look like?' And I just built it."

What moved me most was his honesty about what the tools are doing to the hierarchy of creation.

I told him about seeing a 12-year-old at a hackathon who built a product idea in Lovable that Mindaugas, as an experienced designer, couldn't have built himself at 12, 24, or 34.

"I had a look at it," the hackathon organizer had told him, "and I couldn't build this on my own. No way."

Mindaugas leaned into that. "And with kids as well, they have not been damaged like we have right? We've worked at companies, we've been told 'no, this doesn't work' or 'this idea is bad' or 'you shouldn't do it because you're thinking about it the wrong way.'"

Kids don't carry that weight. They don't know what they're not supposed to be able to do. So they just build it.

"If they can think it and they can understand what the tool can do, they're just going to make it," he said.

That's the competition now. Not other designers with degrees from RISD. Not the Ivy League. Kids with an idea and access to the right tool.

I asked him about guardrails. About human-centered design. About how we make sure AI enhances rather than erases what's good about human creativity.

"I think it enhances it in like simple ways," Mindaugas started. Then he painted this picture:

"Somebody has an idea. They maybe need to raise some money. Often those founders then end up following this path of you need to raise more money, and then you become a CEO. But what tends to happen is you start going away from that, because the company starts maturing and growing."

He's talking about the death of the founder's vision. How the people who start companies because they deeply care about a problem end up so far removed from that problem that they can't remember why they started.

"I know so many more teams and founders who are intentionally want to stay as small as possible, not raise money if they don't have to, and especially those founders or those small teams, they want to stay close to the customer. They want to keep talking to the customer."

And here's the beauty of it: tools like Lovable let them do that. They don't need to raise $5 million and build a huge team and get farther from the problem. They can stay small and stay close.

"I think what I'm trying to say is it keeps us to the human and the customer, which is the most important thing," Mindaugas said.

But he was also clear about what's changing in design itself.

"I don't need you for your hard skills anymore," he told me. "I don't need you for your Figma skills anymore. I don't care how many years you've spent using Figma."

He painted a different future for designers.

"I still need you, but now I need you for example to jump on a call and prototype live, because I just did a bunch of user research. I don't want to hand that off to somebody, right? I still want to hear those things at the beginning. But you're still needed. What I care about is, like, do you understand behavior psychology? Do you understand design principles?"

Instead of spending ten days in Figma and coming back with mockups that don't match the vision, designers and founders jump on a call together. They prototype live. They iterate in real time.

"Then we're going to tell the AI to make it better, right?" he said.

And that's what changes everything. Not because designers go away. But because what we ask of designers changes completely.

I asked Mindaugas if roles would still exist in a year or two. His answer was definitive.

"In a year short? But in two, three years, I don't think so."

Not because jobs disappear. Because they evolve into something more integrated.

Three companies had reached out to him with the same kind of offer. They didn't want a designer or a PM or an engineer. They wanted someone who could think about the problem, talk to customers, define it, design it, PM it, prototype it, validate it, and build it.

"That's a lot of skills or roles in one, right?" he said.

And here's what shocked him: "No job description was mentioned. No at any point nobody asked for my CV."

They just looked at what he could do and said, "Can you solve this problem?"

I asked him about hiring. If you were building a team, would you hire designers, engineers, or PMs?

"It depends on like I would hire any of them, as long as they can supplement the gaps, right," he said. "I would not hire somebody just to do one thing, because I'd be like, 'Well, wait, I can basically do it myself.' But if there's two of us who are now supercharging ourselves, we're playing the roles of multiple people. Then whoa, that becomes like a team of eight essentially."

The math is different now. One person with the right tools can do the work of eight people from ten years ago.

What stayed with me most was his clarity about what learning looks like now.

"Every single day there's a new announcement. Every single day, technology is changing," he said. "The only way to know if you're going to survive is to have been using these tools every day and shipping things."

Not reading about it. Not taking a course. Shipping. Making mistakes. Learning from failure.

That's the education of this moment. The degree is your graveyard of projects. The credential is what you've built.

Near the end of our call, Mindaugas said something that made me think about responsibility and democratization at the same time.

"You can think of the problem and understand the space, strategize some ideas, then go talk to some customers. Define it, design it, PM it, prototype it, validate it, then build it."

That whole workflow, that whole practice of product leadership, used to require a team of specialists and years of experience and access to resources.

Now it requires an idea and a tool and a willingness to learn.

Mindaugas reminded me that the most powerful transformation happening right now isn't about AI replacing designers. It's about AI giving tools to people who never had access to the tools before. The 99% that had ideas but no way to build them. The kids who don't know what they're not supposed to be able to do. The founders who want to stay close to their customers. That's the real shift. That's where the future lives.