Startups are the Future of Employment

AI is about to make the concept of a traditional job obsolete.

That's great news, because it means they are going to get replaced by Founders building startups.

Welcome to the next generation of employer — You.

While everyone else is scrambling to wonder what's going to happen to so many jobs lost (and it's a real issue), we're thinking about what happens next. Does everyone just "lose their job" and stop working? Of course not. We create new ones.

The only difference this time is that those new jobs will largely be created by the next generation of Founders who need to rely on themselves for employment, not a corporation. And that makes things awfully interesting.

The Death of "Big Employment"

Within the next 5 to 10 years, the concept of a giant employer pooling labor to accomplish goals will be largely decimated. For centuries, most companies scaled demand with a proportionate amount of labor, so in order for a company to grow, it had to be good at pooling lots of that labor.

But that labor was predicated on the fact that there was no more efficient way to get the work done. We've seen this with industrialization, the computer age, the Internet revolution, and now AI. What was once the domain of labor is now the domain of a machine.

And this is the part that everyone is missing.

When the labor and capital requirement drops significantly, so does the competitive moat. Now, to do things at the scale of a huge company, you don't have to have thousands of people. Imagine mixing millions of people who have to go searching for work with thousands of companies that can no longer compete just on being "big."

An Explosion of Consumption

As costs to produce goods and services plummet with AI, the ability to consume those products skyrockets. We literally just watched this happen with the Internet. Remember when a CD was $20 and you got to pick one artist to listen to? Now for $20 you can listen to every artist that's ever existed. When costs of goods plummets, consumption soars.

The explosion we're about to see in consumption will create vastly more startups than we've ever even been able to conceptualize. Look at every app on your phone. Almost none of those companies existed 20 years ago. That's because every new cycle breeds entirely new opportunities. And you know who creates those opportunities? Startups.

But startups won't be the same either. They won't need nearly the capital (sorry VCs, we won't miss sucking up to you), the people, or the time they used to take. A single person will be able to achieve phenomenal success in a fraction of the time. Which is also the reason we're about to see a hell of a lot more startups, since the bar to success will be so much lower when we just need to feed ourselves.

The Rise of the Micro Startup Economy

Lower costs will drive more startups and their Founders to specialize in highly bespoke markets. Think about how the "Creator Economy" didn't exist 5 seconds ago, and now there are marketing agencies and whole software markets completely devoted to serving Creators.

Every one of those new nodes will create entirely new micro markets for countless Founders to expand into. Many Founders will double as mercenary talent to other Founders, creating a massive shared labor pool. Hundreds of new companies will be spawned as marketplaces for those labor pools. I can go on like this all day...

The point is that we're moving toward a dynamic, highly decentralized startup economy where Founders won't just be the weirdos that we always have been — we'll all be weirdos. Everyone will need to be a Founder as a way to chart their own course.
For once, being a Founder will be a sensible career path.

Not a Matter of When, a Matter of How Big

There's no version of our world where we don't wind up with 100x more startups. And I'm probably undershooting that mark.

What none of us can comprehend at this point is just how big this trend will be. It won't be fear or greed — it'll be the greatest essence of both, simultaneously. The fear of not being safe with a traditional employer, combined with the greed of wanting to control our own destiny, and compensation.

When so many of our peers are charting their own courses, it creates an implicit permission for us to do the same. This is a snowball that gets bigger and bigger every time someone is displaced from a traditional job and replaces it with their own company.

We're not in the Age of AI. We're in the Age of Startups. And I can tell you as a lifelong Founder, I've been waiting for this Age my entire life.

Game on.

In Case You Missed It

F*ck Big Announcements — Small Victories Drive Startups If you’re waiting for home runs all day — you’re going to be waiting a long time. That’s not how this game is played. It’s a daily struggle, but in the end, it’s how big victories are won.

How Do I Design My Startup Around My Life? There’s very little preventing us from designing our startups around our life goals. It starts with us being very clear about what we want to achieve and then taking clear, small steps toward those outcomes.

The Curse of the 37-Year-Old Founder Let's talk about the dues Founders pay for neglecting their health. Pushing yourself too much, putting your body through so much pressure, and then ignoring the warning signs as they come, you’re unconsciously trading your life for the success of your company.