Every previous wave of change - the Industrial Revolution, digital transformation - gave companies decades to adapt. Generative AI gives them months. Sam Mallikarjunan argues that this pace, plus a "boundary collapse" where competitors attack sideways from entirely different industries, flips the advantage to small, agile teams: chaos isn't a pit, it's a ladder.
Running a 23-person team that rivals its 7,000-employee parent, he's blunt that the technology will take care of itself - the hard part is people. He makes empathy the real moat AI can't copy, and warns that no one is creative when they're scared, so a leader's first job is psychological safety, clarity, and developing their team through the chaos rather than just cutting costs.
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Nice to be here. Not not even that jet lagged. I came in on Sunday. As you mentioned, I'm Sam. I run the team at agent dot ai. Although I'm not supposed to say the dot ai, the marketing team gets mad about that, but I don't work for the marketing team.
We are not, so has anybody heard of HubSpot? Just a quick round of applause survey. Yeah, okay. We are not part of HubSpot, which is something I will explain later. I did teach innovation management. I've spent most of my career creating chaos, which is a lot of fun.
If you ask my mother, spent most of my life creating chaos. I'll put that in there for Mother's Day. But I've definitely spent my entire career doing it, because it's fun. You're little guy, right? Nobody watches Star Wars and Roots for the Empire.
Well, nobody I know watches Star Wars and Roots for the Empire. I launched a startup in twenty twenty called OneScreen dot ai, as I mentioned. It was focused on out of home advertising. Guess what people couldn't do? They couldn't go out of home.
In twenty twenty, chaos became a lot less fun. After that so it was an out of home advertising startup. After that, it was very heavily dependent on free cash flow, not margins. Then the entire sector of the US banking center that supports startups decided to collapse.
This was not fun. The team's fine, saved it, they're all good, but that was not the kind of chaos that I enjoyed. Because usually, chaos favors the smaller, more agile teams. Time favors incumbents. When things move fast and are chaotic, it favors people who want to do something fun.
When you have a lot of time, it's not as urgent. We don't have a lot of time right now. So generative AI was not like a thing that we were talking about five years ago. I asked it to write actually a talk for you, Because we're talking about humans are going to be replaced by AI, right?
And I gave it a fair advantage. I fed it everything I've ever read, everything I've ever said, everything I've ever written. I really gave it as much context as I could. And what it generated was okay, but fairly mediocre. So I am going give you the option, if you'd like, I will post it on LinkedIn later, you can go and listen to the AI talk.
It's pretty similar to everything you've heard from everybody else. Or you can stay here and you can listen to my talk. One of the things, again, talked about the pace of change. People talk about the Industrial Revolution. They're like, oh, we'll survive AI, we survived the Industrial Revolution.
That drives me insane. The Industrial Revolution did not happen everywhere at once, and it took over a century before not having it was a competitive disadvantage. We used to name our families after what we did in the Smiths, Wainwrights made wagons. Now we can't even name our freaking companies after what we do, because three, four, five years from now, it might be entirely different, the thing that we have to do.
HubSpot's a meaningless term, but it worked because was agent dot ai is much more literal terms. We can't really go into the restaurant management business as agent dot ai. But you had decades to adapt usually. Digital transformation, another example. You had more like twenty years to adapt, right?
If you didn't have a website by about twenty ten, you were still fine, right? I remember having to explain to people what a search engine was before we could sell them SEO software, but you can kind of wait that out. Like if you were later in your career in the late 1990s, you just wait it out, right, because it didn't really affect you.
This is happening insanely fast. Is it like we'll do the round of applause thing because it's quite kind of bright out here. I can't do the hands. Who feels like this is happening really fast? If you don't feel like clapping, can also sob internally.
That also works in terms of trying to keep up with how fast this is changing. But this is the quote that's been in my mind for the last couple of years. This is from a TV show called Game of Thrones. Most people have heard of it, not everybody has.
But this character has this quote, chaos isn't a pit, it's a ladder. Because the only people who like stability are the people at the top. The people who want to climb the ladder, you got to shake it, otherwise you can't get around the person that's at the top.
You're closer to the base, you're much more stable. It's very hard as a large company to innovate. It's very easy as a small company to pivot and innovate. So this is something so boring, I'm not even going to touch on it, but this is the thing we used to teach, right?
Like you got your vision, strategy, execution. Business school was so beautifully simple back in the day because you just had to do things in this kind of nice linear fashion. Now, nobody's roadmap looks like this, right? The roadmap is much more chaotic. So three things have happened.
One, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically. So if we just look at turnover on, for example, the Fortune five hundred, companies that didn't exist fifteen years ago are now on the Fortune five hundred. That is terrifying if you're the CEO of a very large company.
The pace of change is happening so fast, time favors startups. Time does not favor incumbents. Larger incumbents can wait out change. Boundary collapse, this one's particularly interesting to me. Your competitors actually, we just heard it. Your competitors may not be in your industry.
Like anybody heard of Duolingo, the language training app? They just launched a chess app. Nobody at chess dot com saw that coming, right? Like your competitors can move sideways in ways you've never been able to do, and now you've got to worry about a lot more people, right?
You don't have to watch just the companies in your vertical. You've got to watch everybody who could come and kind of eat your lunch. And this has also changed the nature of competitive advantage, because cost and funding used to be really, really important.
But now, like my last startup, I raised ten million dollars for the seed round, right? Hired a marketing team, everything else like that. Now you don't need that. You can have a marketing team. You can have a sales team. You can be very competitive without having to raise as much capital, which means that you have a lot more freaking competitors because you don't have to go through that process.
So these competitive dynamics have changed. One, the pace, which is terrifying, right? Nobody's ever been on a roller coaster that went super slow and had fun. So it's like terrifying, but also fun. The boundary collapse, I really want you to understand that one because you will be surprised where competition comes from.
In part, by the way, because your competitors think like you. So if I, again, don't work for HubSpot, I'll explain. If I focus just on what Salesforce was going to do, those people kind of like know what we're thinking, what we're gonna do at HubSpot.
But if I focus on other startups that are doing other things, like those people are thinking in a different way than I am, that's what scares me. Fighting a fight you're prepared for, okay, you might lose, right? But you're prepared for it. Fighting a fight you didn't know was going to happen is pretty frustrating.
So this is Clay Christensen. He is credited with inventing the concept of disruptive innovation. He once called me dumb. Highlight of my career. It was actually pretty freaking awesome. We were talking at HubSpot, this is probably fifteen years ago, and he was explaining how the low end of the market is usually where disruption comes from.
You don't generally launch a startup and say like, cool, I'm going go serve the really expensive, hard to get, hard to support customers. You start lower and you work your way up. And so I asked him, should we just invest in defending the low end of the market and then allow us to move upwards?
That's what he said was dumb. The dumber thing to do is to try and figure out how to disrupt yourself. That is hard. At labs, my job was to figure out how I would kill the core company, but do it before anybody else figured out how to do it.
So this mentality, of you can't wait. You really couldn't wait for digital transformation, but now you can't wait for McKinsey or Deloitte or somebody else to write a paper, and then you go to an executive workshop and all that kind of stuff, because everything's changed, right?
Even running a startup right now is insane. MCP, the whole model context program, that wasn't a thing a year ago. How was I supposed to put that in my roadmap? This is awesome because it's chaotic, but it's also terrifying. But we don't talk enough about people because you still need people.
You have humans who are doing things, but now you've got sales reps that can design presentation decks without the marketing team. You've got marketers who can write code. You've got developers who somehow suddenly understand economics and pricing and stuff like that. So your organization has changed dramatically.
I've got a person on the team who really wants to work on customer success team, but they've been running paid their entire life. So they've kind of always been in that silo. They've been running paid advertising. So how do you change the org structure when people's jobs aren't very clearly defined anymore?
It's much more chaotic. It's more like this. It's very fluid, right? You're going spin up small teams. People are going to do some stuff. You might work on different teams. It's not going to look as easy and simple as it used to be.
The one thing I want to call out, has anybody ever had a really terrible manager? Sob internally. Has anybody ever had a really great manager? This you can clap for. Managers are important, not because of the way they follow our work and keep us in line and stuff like that.
Managers are important because they generally have experience that we don't have, and then give us coaching that we need, that can teach us stuff. That is something you cannot let go away. People are trying to cut out the middle management layer. I think that's great.
The middle management layer is entirely too big and doesn't do that much. But keep in mind the one thing you need to preserve, which is the impact of the middle management layer on the front line. If we get rid of all the junior sales reps because we automated outbound calling and everything else like that, where do the senior sales reps come from?
You have to be thinking about that development as you're thinking about your reorg. So a couple specific ways. One is dotted line orgs. This is essentially what I did at HubSpot, where I reported to the chief marketing officer, but realistically, I was reporting to the chief technology officer.
And we didn't create a labs team. We just had dotted lines. Like, cool, you're going to work on this project now. Hybrid structures is also really interesting, where you have maybe a core team and then you've got some other teams. A lot of stuff, holacracy, flatocracy, a lot of people have spent time figuring out the hybrid structures.
Hybrids are hard. Anytime you try and do two things at once, it's quite hard. I'm not walking and chewing gum right now, in part because I make it hard to speak, but also because it's just a distraction. So hybrid is a bit of a challenge.
DARPA style teams are kind of interesting. So this article is more than twelve years old. If you Google it, Harvard Business Review had an article on how DARPA manages innovation. So DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They're best known for inventing ARPANET, which we now know as the internet.
So they've had a little bit of an impact on the world in which we live. But what they do is they're entirely separate. They're not part of the Department of Defense, anything else like that. They assemble a temporary team of experts to accomplish a discrete task, and then they can focus on that.
So I don't work at HubSpot. Keep saying that. But I am HubSpot adjacent. So my job is to figure out, can we create a professional network for AI agents? I hate that phrase, but Dharmesh Shah, who's the primary investor in Agent dot ai, is very sold on it.
So what does it mean? If these are going be human kind of things with credentials and skills and like a background portfolio of work, what does mean? Can we build that? So that is what we are, but we're entirely independent. I don't have to follow any of their rules.
I don't have to report to any of them. I don't have to solve for anything that matters to them. And if we fail, which is probable, they're not really out that much. We didn't distract much from the internal company. We just borrowed some of their available cash.
If we succeed, they get a lot. First of all, because they will already own us for various weird reasons. But second of all, because they will have figured out first how to do this. So we've got roughly two million users at Agent dot ai right now, which is almost on par with the core company's adoption.
And that company it's a thirty billion dollars company with seven thousand employees. I've got twenty three people. And I was still able to grow that fast. That is the amazing power of AI. Because you don't have to go as slow as you used to.
This is an interesting quote. It's easy to be a saint in heaven. When things are going really well, it's easy to be innovative and creative. Right? Large companies created these corporate venture capital arms. Innovation Labs became a thing. Like, when things are going well, it is easy to be creative and take risks.
When things are going poorly, it is also very easy to take risks and be creative. Fun fact, when I applied to HubSpot back in twenty ten, I didn't have a college degree, had no real relevant experience. I was not gonna get in. So I built a site called hiremehubspot dot com, and I targeted their employees with ads to register for the free webinar on why you should hire me.
And it worked. Like, you got a third of the company, which to be fair was only thirty people at the time, but I got a third of the company to sign up for this webinar. Fun fact, I didn't know how to do a webinar.
I was just hoping that I would get somebody's attention before I had to prove that I actually didn't know what I was doing. That is chaos, because chaos is not knowing what comes next. If I'd only gotten five people to sign up for it, maybe one of them's a recruiter, then I actually had to do a webinar, which I had never done before in my life, They were just really popular back then.
That would have been a huge challenge. So things are going well, easy to be creative. Things are going really poorly, you got nothing to lose. Easy to be creative. We are in a state where things aren't going terribly for most of it, but it's also not going great.
Like if you're a large company, if you're a startup right now, nobody really feels like right now everything's going great. This is when you wanna take risks. Large companies have become very risk averse. They're doing layoffs, they're reducing capital expenditure right when they probably should be doubling down, especially on AI initiatives.
But that's not how it works. The larger companies are really, really pressured to solve for efficiency. Now, quick survey, and actually you can do the hand thing now because my eyes have adjusted. Raise your hand if you work for a company with more than one thousand employees.
Okay, more than let's let's go the other way now. Less than five hundred employees. I love conferences like this. Less than one hundred employees. Less than fifty. I feel like an auctioneer. Less than ten. You're my people. I love it. I love it.
Because small scale speed favors chaos, and chaos is the really fun part of it. A few jobs ago, they recruited me just by saying, do you wanna fight Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Slack at the same time? That was a really dumb idea. We got our butts kicked, but we did it, and it was fun.
The big thing so there's a great book by a guy named Dan Pink that talks about creativity. So like when things are going really terribly or things are going really well, it's easy to take risks. When you're in that messy middle, nobody feels like taking risks.
Everybody on your team, and probably you too, right now are worried about am I gonna have a job in six months? You are worried about that. Again, sobbed internally, surveyed. The people on your team are being asked to be creative and innovative. Quick show of hands, has anybody just been asked by their company to focus on AI?
Yeah, okay, everybody went like this, which I get. That's not clear. Nobody knows what that means, which is fine if you have comfort, if you have psychological safety. So another thing we've forgotten, and by the way, if you can tell, my theme is all about humans.
All about people. The technology will take care of itself. I'm not as concerned about that. The way we treat people in organizations when things are happening fast and they're chaotic, that's what worries me. So like I've made a lot of mistakes, but our investors, like I've made a huge mistake yesterday that cost, don't worry about it, it was bad.
But the investors didn't get mad at me. The investors were like, okay, we understand that, like you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna go fast. They would rather me take that chance. Now granted, I've worked with them for almost twenty years, so I have a lot of psychological safety simply because I know and trust them.
But you may not have that same amount of psychological safety. Your people probably don't because it's hard to give it to them, right? Like you may end up doing layoffs and not knowing that you were gonna do layoffs. And your people all know that.
Everything's happening so fast, the chaos is so fast, that it's really hard to feel secure. But you can't be creative if you're terrified. Nobody takes risks, ignore the risk taking, because that's the thing. Nobody can even think outside the box when you're scared, right?
We as a species did not evolve to start If we hear a rustling in the bushes and we see a lion kind of like poking its head out, none of us sit down and say, let's do an OKR assessment of our innovation initiatives.
That's like a thing, right? When you're scared, you focus, you do the one thing that you know, and everybody's kind of scared right now. Excitement is scary. For some weird reason, we as a species jump out of airplanes, done that. Ride roller coasters, done that.
People go shark diving in caves. This was not part of the speech survey. Has anybody done the shark diving in a cage thing? Okay, same people. Oh, wait, somebody did. This is what we do, right? But you have to have that psychological safety.
Your first job is actually to look out for yourself. So the best life advice I ever got came from a great philosopher, which was the people who make airline safety videos. The airline safety video, they tell you, at least in most countries I've been to, secure your mask before assisting others.
So a little mask drops down, right? It's not because I look at my wife and I'm like, I'm not worried about you, right? It's because if you can't breathe, you can't help the people who depend on you. So you have to think about your own psychological safety.
You have to think about your own confidence, your own stress management. Everybody's stress level is just higher right now, right? So like if we, on a scale of zero to ten, like usually five years ago, maybe we were all at like a three or four.
Now our baseline's like a five. So the amount that you can add to somebody's stress has decreased. But focus on yourself first. You have to have that confidence. You have to have that clarity. You deserve that understanding from your boss. So when I'm coaching managers, the biggest mistake that I see them make is assuming that people will come and tell them when they have a problem or when they're confused.
So again, a sob and turn on survey. Anybody planned to talk to their boss at one point in their career and then chickened out at the last minute? Happens all the time, right? Because that is, you're a little worried, you practice in the mirror, everything else like that.
But then a boss usually says, how are things going? Which is incredibly generic. Is there anything you're worried about? Which is incredibly generic. And people just reflexively don't say yes. You deserve that clarity from your boss. You owe that clarity to the people on your team.
That is why you are in a management or a leadership position. It's not for the strategy. Frankly, when ChatGeezy came out, I made a McKinsey consultant in a box as a joke. It just fed it all of the stuff that we taught at Harvard and everything else like that, all the MBA stuff.
And it was able to like, cool, do a blue ocean strategy. That's not really what they pay us for. They pay us to help manage all of the people in an era in which we can't even tell people what team they're on. How are you supposed to grow somebody's career when the marketers are writing code?
It's not like they're doing little code tests, code reviews with the engineering team, right? How do you measure and give people that clarity? So we talked about the change, ZERP versus NOW. We had to invent a new acronym, ZERP, Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon.
This was things you could get away with back when money was free. So taking it back to my startup from a while ago, it was built on two fundamental assumptions. One, that people would be allowed to leave their homes. And two, that capital was relatively inexpensive, which for fifteen years it was.
And this is the problem, is that we have trained an entire generation of entrepreneurs, leaders, investors wrong. If you're talking to a VC, for example, they'll be like, oh, don't remember like two thousand and eight and the collapse of everything else like that.
We've trained everybody wrong. And you have to acknowledge this for yourself and again, for the people on your team, which is that you've got these assumptions that might seem obvious. People can leave their homes. It's not necessarily obvious. So changing that mindset. Now we're gonna talk about paradoxes and contradictions.
So I was once in the kitchen at HubSpot, this was probably fourteen years ago. And I asked my friend Ananda, I'm like, what are you doing? And he said, I'm running HubSpot Labs. I said, well, that's quite entertaining because I'm running HubSpot Labs. Haven't seen you at any of the meetings.
It turns out two different executives had created their own versions of HubSpot Labs because it was better for us to have a little inefficiency than it was for us to risk some nerd in a basement at MIT figuring out *** ** **** HubSpot as a core company.
So you've got to balance, especially now. And that was when capital was cheap. They could get away with funding two things. Right now, capital is not cheap. It's quite expensive. It's very scarce. And you have to fund all these innovation initiatives. It is a contradiction.
We are an innovation team at Agent dot ai with an innovation team. When the operator thing came out, the new MCP thing came out, I literally carved off a separate team because even as a startup, the fundamentals of the industry are changing so fast that I can't keep up.
Now, chaos is the latter. Chaos is good for startups. I love the fact that you now compete with everyone, everywhere, all at once. It used to be that if you had easier access to capital, maybe you're London, Ireland, New York, San Francisco, that was kind of the only way you could raise.
And you didn't really have to worry about friends in my family's hometown of Chennai raising a bunch of capital and disrupting you. One, it was hard for them to raise capital. Two, the cultural sensitivities are actually a little weird. So I used AI in two ways preparing for this talk.
Well, other than making fun of it by doing the fake thing. One was I asked what jokes, cultural references, and other things I shouldn't say in Scotland, because I didn't know that. And if you go on YouTube, can find some rather hilarious videos of me messing that up in other countries.
So I have learned my lesson. The other was I made it a synthetic audience. So all of the talks, all of the sponsors, everybody said on social media about this conference, fed it into the AI, and that way I could practice against it and see what it would find interesting.
Very curious to see how it grades, how it actually been in real life, but that was the way that I used AI. Now, because you don't have to raise all this capital, if you're in Scotland and you wanna fight a competitor in San Francisco, you can. You don't need to raise that much money.
And also the cultural context can be translated, not just language. Most people forget that the T in GPT, the transformers, were originally invented for translation. It turns out that if you can speak multiple languages, you can actually do quite a bit in terms of understanding language.
But helping you understand that cultural context, you can sell into any market that you want to. You don't have to raise as much money to do it. So it is awesome because I love competition. I hate the easy fight, right? And all of us are here because you hate easy fights.
Otherwise, you would go to, I don't know, some summit in a place that's warmer than here. Everybody keeps telling me it's warm. I'm from Florida. I don't know how to translate that into Celsius necessarily, but like I have to wear a coat. I find that fascinating and beautiful.
My favorite story of this is actually, near me, I have a pub called Patty Cassidy's. They can't update their website without me helping them. They built an AI agent that they can upload all of their inventory and it invents recipes for them and gives them fun names.
This company is doing Okay, I'll take that website. Is doing AI inventory optimization turnover that would make Amazon proud. That's freaking awesome. Then they also, again, not coders, they built a game called Drunken Spelling Bee. This is me. They wrote all the code, everything else like that.
I'm pointing at my wife because she laughed way too hard when my word was ignoramus. But they did that and increased their bookings like eight hundred percent on Tuesdays, which was kind of their goal. That is freaking cool. Right? We talk about the bigger companies.
Like, I love the story, Google got sucker punched by a nonprofit research firm. That's great. Now OpenAI is big, they've raised a lot of money, etcetera. That's great. But I love this. I love the fact that small companies, small businesses can be incredibly competitive in ways that have never before been possible.
Startups in particular, you don't have to be as worried about your competition as you used to be. In fact, my least favorite investor question is, what are you going to do if XYZ incumbent enters your space? That is an adorable question now. You will move much, much faster than they do.
So this is the one thing I want you to remember is empathy being the moat. Empathy is the thing that AI can't do, right? That's why I wrote such a mediocre article or podcast is because it couldn't figure out what would really be interesting to people.
This is also how we develop our teams. And this is my theory. We will go from having SaaS companies with like ninety percent margins, services companies with having twenty percent margins, and we'll probably end up with these hybrid models of like fifty percent, sixty percent margins.
Everybody's looking at AI to save costs right now, right? Can we get rid of the live chat team? Can we do all our stuff? Guess what? When everybody has the same advantage, it's not an advantage anymore, unless you're building your own foundational models, in which case, good for you trying to hire those engineers, because that's really hard.
But unless you're building your own foundational models, generally all of your competitors have access to the same tools that you do. So if you all do the same obvious thing, you're not gonna be very competitive. A few things I wanna Kind of categories, right?
Operational, reputational, you can get in a lot of trouble if you just let AI do stuff, so I wanted to call that out. The strategic implications, I think are important. That's why I've spent most of this talking about. The ethical implications, I also find interesting.
Does anybody remember Napster? Quick round of applause. Has anyone heard of Spotify? Spotify did the same thing Napster did, just in a more clarified regulatory environment. Napster knew that they could steal stuff and mix it around, they got shut down. They did not end up being successful.
Spotify learned those lessons. They were not first, they were not the fastest, but they made it work because they did think about how do the ethics, even if it wasn't illegal, what Napster was doing was not illegal at the time, at least not by any definition that we had in law back then, but it became illegal.
So I'm quite worried right now actually about any organization that's building too much of their infrastructure, their organization on things like OpenAI. Love those people, don't get me wrong, but they have vacuumed up the entire internet to train AI models without compensating the people who did it, right?
And especially in Europe where you have like the right to be forgotten, it is really hard to prove that a foundational model has forgotten everything I've said on the internet. So I think there's some strategic risks you need to be aware of. There's ways to mitigate it. There's open source models.
There's things like that. But I think that's something you need to be aware of. Chaos is a ladder. Favors the people who can move fast. It's exciting. Again, if you wanna be comfortable and just like spend more time playing chess, you can go work at a big company, but you're not really in control of your destiny there.
Because that big company is also having chaos and that chaos might affect you when you're not ready for it. If you wanna go create chaos, you're gonna have a lot of fun. But just understand that the pace and scale of chaos is much higher right now, which is more opportunity, but it's also much more stressful.
So take care of yourself, take care of the people on your team. Do not just assume that AI can lower costs. What AI can do is, to an extent, take away all the dumb stuff that we have to deal with. Somebody the other day was like, oh, is this gonna be your buying agent and my selling agent arguing with each other?
Yeah. That's great. I don't wanna do that part. I wanna understand more about how you advise me on strategy and things like that. So let it do all the dumb stuff and then let your sales reps, your live chat reps, your marketers be more empathetic.
I'm willing to bet very few people's marketing teams have created a synthetic AI representation of their audience to test how their messaging was gonna work. Because at HubSpot, I had it easy. I was a marketer, marketing to marketers, about marketing. I once sent an email that said, I know that you know that I know that you opened this email and didn't click Went great, you can't usually do that.
So I had it easy. Creating those synthetic audiences, thinking about that matters. So I wanna end on a final story. So I grew up in Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is where NASA launches all of their rockets. So there was nothing to do where I lived other than surf, feed tourists, and work at NASA.
This woman, her name is Dorothy Vaughn. If you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, you'll recognize her. If not, you should watch the movie Hidden Figures. She was leading a team of computers, because computers was a job title. That was not a noun. She was leading a team of computers, and then they bring in this big IBM thing the size of a house.
She knew this was gonna be an issue. So she stole books from the library, depending on your point of view, stole books from the library, taught herself Fortran, then taught her entire team Fortran. She didn't just leverage her own into growth or something like that.
She taught her team Fortran, that's the kind of boss you'd follow into hell because you know you can trust them. And that's what we need right now. We need the trust. We need the empathy. We need to know that people are there for us, that they're thinking about us.
Your people need to know that about you too. I love that story, not because she disrupted and innovated and things like that. I love that story because she knew that she could not be successful if she didn't also help other people understand things.
So whatever you're feeling right now, the chaos, the stress, the excitement, everybody else is feeling that. The more senior you are, it's kind of a bell curve. The more senior you are, the more terrified you are actually, because you know how bad things can go.
Junior, they may not be as terrified because they just may not know how bad things can go. In that messy middle, where most of us sit, is an area of confusion and opportunity. So sucker punch the big people in your company. Really like think sideways because you can disrupt anybody sideways.
Like HubSpot was famous for the all in one thing. Right now everybody does that. Everybody can be all in one. LinkedIn launched puzzles. Anybody do puzzles on LinkedIn? I'm weirdly competitive about this. So let's like do the TuringFest hashtag on LinkedIn, and like, we'll share our puzzle screens.
The New York Times people did not realize that LinkedIn was going to come and eat their lunch. New York Times has a lot of famous games. So think about that. Be excited. This is, ah, it's so much fun. We were fighting a game of millimeters for like ten years, right?
How can I get another one percent out of my click through rate? How can I get slightly better SEO? Now we finally get to have fun again, which is really exciting, really enjoyable. It's also really terrifying, but that's okay. Just remember this, that the future's human, your competitive advantages are also going to be human.
In a world where there's artificial general intelligence and we collectively retire as a species, I don't care. I spend zero percent of my time worrying about that because I get to retire as a species, and the AI will keep me as a pet, and it'll be great.
I've always wanted to be a dog. I take way too good care of my dog. But in the intervening time, your advantages are actually going to be how do you enable the people on your team to be more empathetic? How do you break them out of rigid structures?
How do you help them understand people better? One last story, my friend, I caught him the other day, actually a couple weeks ago, texting. If you don't tell AI to adopt a perspective, you can kind of tell it's AI. And I'm like, Hey, Tim, are you using AI to write your text messages to me?
He was. He's got some learning communication disabilities. It's always been a challenge for me to understand what he wanted to say. So he would talk to the AI. He also trained it on like how I post and think, and it would translate what he wanted to say to me.
That's beautiful. We're talking about AI as if it's gonna replace people and stuff like that, and there will be disruption, but I think we can figure that out. I don't wanna lose sight of the beautiful things that it can do to us by helping us be more empathetic at scale.
