I just got out of meeting a founder who’s building a life sciences company. He’s early stage, raised a couple of rounds. He’s essentially hiring extreme AI native talent who feel limitless. Who are extremely high agency and will just run through walls to get things done. Their brains have a lot of plasticity to not have any priors. Or he is hiring deep domain experts and system thinkers who can build the architecture that these people can run on top of.
He finds the middle where people are AI curious but have not fully gone off the deep end, just not ready. They revert to the type of behavior that they were used to and go back to pattern matching.
I got out of the room having deep impostor syndrome and was thinking, was he talking about me? More on that later.
Every early stage founder I meet tells me the same version of this. We talk about AI native companies that are built this way. We don’t talk enough about AI native people that are essentially doing the same thing.
I think it’s broadly about the no fear approach. They’re just constantly able to spin up and not ask for permission but have the courage to really go at any task, whether it’s reaching out to professors, whether it’s flying out of the country to meet patients. We constantly hear about first time founders who have remarkable depth in understanding the market. And they have a fleet of intelligence that helps them get up to speed faster than ever before. Almost to the point where the rate of learning and velocity is just amplified by AI.
AI alone doesn’t get you the amplification. Agency alone doesn’t get you there anymore since someone with AI can theoretically out amplify you. Combine both of them and I think you’re truly unstoppable.
Or you lean hard on what you’re out of distribution at. You become 10x better at that using AI. I think unfortunately the middle hollows out and you will be out of a job.
Good product instincts and product sense are still probably important in the generative ideas that my career has helped me with. But the role of a PM has transformed. We were beholden to our designers and engineers, and now we can be amplified with AI. Someone like me who spent a decade in product is probably the wrong archetype. I’m almost unemployable maybe when I go to these companies. That’s kind of hard to realize. I’m seeing a lot of people in my spectrum who are held back by that experience of the past. Now feeling like suddenly, hey, nobody wants you anymore.
I feel like I need to rewire my brain, even though I am trying to do that actively. I program for two hours a day, mostly to understand the shape of AI. I never learned any of the ML concepts deeply even though I have an electrical engineering and computer science background. Seeing Codex be so good at browser use and able to do things end to end that I was still doing manually. Or seeing people able to create complex orchestration as a single individual. I do feel slow since I have priors and I have to constantly train my mind to have no priors.
So going back to the founder, was he talking about me? If you asked me six months ago, I’d probably fit that narrative. Now, I’m not really sure, but six months from now I can guarantee you that won’t be me. If you read this thinking this is you, it’s not too late.