When my company was failing, I wasn't looking for a job. I didn't want one. I was a founder. You do that to build something you believe in, on your own terms, not to collect a title. The thing I'd built was dying, and the last thing I wanted was to become a line on someone else's org chart. So I wasn't updating a resume. I was asking a different question, the kind you only ask after something you built falls apart. Not what pays, not what's open. Just this. What could I give the next 10+ years of my life to and still wake up believing in? Almost nothing clears that bar. Ten years is a long time to keep believing in anything (assuming it will have very low lows). I had made a quiet peace with the idea that I might not find it. That maybe you get one real swing, and I had taken mine. Then I stumbled upon what @businessbarista and @ArmanHezarkhani were building at @tenex_labs , and for the first time I could see myself somewhere for 10+ years, which is extremely rare. I want to tell you why, because it is not the reason you would guess. I like to research and sometimes even write about what AI is doing to the economy and to our labor force. The economy is splitting into people who build with this technology and people who watch it happen, and the gap between them does not grow in a straight line. It compounds (like a K). Every month you spend on the wrong side of it, the distance grows, and it grows faster than you can ever close it later. I did not fully believe my own thesis until I was living inside it. Here is what the frontier actually feels like, with the hype stripped off. Most nights I kick off a run of AI agents before bed and let them work while I sleep. Some nights it is real work. Some nights it is just an experiment I want to see the shape of by morning. Either way, I wake up to things that used to take a team a week. My night and morning routines have completely shifted. Yesterday an old friend from high school messaged me. He is starting a local business, got quoted ten thousand dollars for a website, and wanted to know if that was fair. I told him to send me the exact specs he gave the guy who quoted him. Then I went to sleep. By the time I woke up Claude had built the whole thing. A custom site, a customer portal, wiring for his Stripe account, a database behind it, email set up, and deployed to his domain. He was dumbfounded and incredibly grateful. That is the gap I write about, sitting in a single text thread. Him, about to pay ten grand. Me, conjuring it between the gym and dinner. And it widens every single day. I still get to feel that same jolt, from the inside. I feel like the dumbest person in our Slack most days, and every time in my life that feeling has shown up, it came right before the biggest leaps I ever made. The ceiling above me is enormous, and I get to climb it every day. You do not learn this from a course or a newsletter. You learn it by doing it, all day, next to people doing it harder than you, on the actual frontier of the most important technology any of us will touch. That is why Tenex cleared the decade bar. The people are the smartest, most technical minds I have ever been around, and I get sharper just by being near them. And the vision is genuinely, wildly ambitious. You get one life. You may as well spend it going for the grand prize. Most people are somewhere fine, at a company that will get to AI eventually, telling themselves there is no rush. There is a rush, and it is the whole point. The years while this technology rewrites every job are the years that decide which side of that gap you spend the rest of your career on. Those years are happening right now, whether you are in them or watching them.

Most takes on AI's impact on the economy are lazy. So for the next 30 days, I'm going to share my data driven observations across 3 areas: 1. What AI is actually doing to the labor market 2. How it's reshaping economic opportunity 3. Where the new opportunities are and who's positioned to take them Right now, every take on AI and jobs is either hype or doom. One side is selling you something. The other is afraid. Almost none of it is backed by data. I sit on both sides of this one. I deploy AI into real companies for a living. And I'm a little too into labor markets (I read county level jobs data for fun...). Two rules I'm holding myself to: - Every post is personal and actionable to you or someone you know. - And I don't miss a day. First post drops tomorrow.