Alexander Mrozek

Founder of Digitale Optimisten Podcast | Columnist for @wiwo | Angel Investor | I write about start-up ideas, and how to build them.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)

— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.

— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”

— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.

— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.

— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.

— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

[Ben Murphy @benjaminmmurphy]

Fourth, this lack of predictability will have bad and obvious consequences for developers:
- If you need to account for the risk of unilateral post-hoc restrictions, labs will either keep more models in-house or just not make them generally available.
- Depending on the exact backstory here, this might disincentivize engagement with the government — lacking clear authorities for mandatory pre-release testing, labs could reasonably just be less candid towards the government about the types of vulnerabilities they've seen to begin with.
- At a minimum, this really seems like the final evidence that Anthropic's strategy of really talking up Fable and Mythos's capabilities in highly public, security-implicating ways has substantially backfired. I don't know that the government wouldn't have reached that conclusion themselves, but as a business matter, those pronouncements have not produced a healthy working relationship with the government.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Every CEO layoff letter in 2026 follows the same template.

"Hardest decision I've ever made. AI changed everything. New roles designed for AI-native work. We owe it to our customers. We're choosing to compete."

I feel like I'm reading the same letter with different logos

[Avishai Abrahami @Avishai_ab]

Sharing here the message I just sent to the whole Wix team:

Today is a sad day for me. We have made a very hard decision.

We are reducing the Wix team size by roughly 20%. It is one of the hardest decisions I have had to make, but I am confident it is the right one, and I will explain why.

Before I go into anything else, let me say - this is a very hard decision because I will be saying goodbye to many people who have worked with me for years, many whom I call friends, people I trust and respect, friends who poured their energy and talent into Wix. Team members I know personally, and team members I never had the chance to meet, but whose commitment and contribution I have witnessed.

So thank you. Thank you for the effort, for the talent, for the passion, and for the friendship.

We are doing this as a company-wide change, a decision that will impact the entire organization, driven by how we need to operate going forward.

Why are we doing this?
The first reason is the Shekel/Dollar rates. In the past few quarters the exchange rate between the Shekel and the US dollar has shifted significantly as the Israeli Shekel strengthens against the US Dollar almost every day. As the majority of our teams are Israel-based, a very meaningful portion of our costs are shekel-denominated, while our revenue is largely dollar-denominated. This creates a structural pressure on our ability to operate at our current scale. It is a reality that directly shapes what is sustainable for our company.

The second stems from the fast evolution of AI capabilities. We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s. This is not just about adopting new tools - it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage and how they operate. Companies that embrace this change will not only build faster; they will build things the previous generation literally could not have imagined.

We are already taking concrete steps in this direction. As you know, we've recently introduced new roles like Xengineer and Creators, designed from the ground up around AI-native ways of working, a meaningful step towards the kind of company we are becoming.

It also means we need to become a faster, leaner, and flatter organization. We are moving to a structure with fewer levels between any member of our leadership and the most junior person on the team. Fewer layers means faster decisions, clearer ownership, and less distance between the people setting direction and the people building the product - but it also means a smaller number of people.

It is clear to us that in this new era, companies need to make this change in order to lead and compete or risk falling behind.

We are choosing to compete.

It is a painful change, a change that touches the lives of many, but I truly believe we have no other choice - we must evolve.

To those of you who are being let go
I want to once more say: Thank you.

Those who are affected will be contacted in person, directly, and we will do everything in our power to handle each conversation with sensitivity, respect, and the care you deserve, you will also be granted personally curated separation packages.

Many of you have given years to this company and built things we are genuinely proud of. I am personally grateful for what you've created, for the culture you've shaped, and for the trust you placed in us. More than anything, this decision was about the shape of the company we need to become. We own that - and we own the responsibility of supporting all of you through what comes next.

To those of you who are staying
What happens in the next few days matters. The people leaving this company are your colleagues, your friends, people you've built things with. They deserve to walk out of here with their heads held high, knowing that their work was real and that we recognize it. Please treat them with the respect they've earned. How we say goodbye says as much about who we are, as anything we've ever built together.

Our broader commitment
Before anything else, our commitment is to our users - to make the hard decisions so Wix continues to be the company that helps them succeed. We work for our users.

Millions of people run their businesses on Wix. Their world is also changing, also uncertain, also shaped by the current shifts. They rely on us - our reliability, our innovation, and our commitment to their success.

The responsibility does not stop with our users - behind every Wix shareholder is a real person whose savings, pension, or investment is tied to how we perform. We take this responsibility very seriously.

If we do not make this change, we will be failing our responsibility to our users, our shareholders, and our employees. In the long run, what is best for our users is best for our employees and best for our shareholders.

Today's decision was made to ensure we are here for our users and our shareholders, you among them, stronger and more capable, for years to come. We are doing this today because we are committed to building a company that is healthy, durable, and positioned to lead.

We will come out of this faster, stronger and better equipped for this new era.

Avishai

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Garret @gladio_descent]

@DJ_CURFEW You can cut all you want, but it doesn't answer the real existential question you're facing: who needs Clickup in 2026? You need to be operating like a startup again, seeking PMF -- driving into a brick wall at 600mph isn't any better for you than driving into it at 60mph

[Zeb Evans @DJ_CURFEW]

Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.

First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.

Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands.

Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition.

I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively.

THE 100X ORGANIZATION
The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.

Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken.

The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems.

These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now.

The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.

THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS

— THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS
I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality.

Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment.

AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down.
Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed.
So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code?

And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time?

If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code.

The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x.

The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated.

I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already.

More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well.

— THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS
Product management and design roles are merging.

Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers.

And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers.

The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results.

The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy.

Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on.

To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production.

Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck.
That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time.

— THE SYSTEM MANAGERS
Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp.

The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world.

You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is.

— THE FRONT-LINERS
In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers.

This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings.

One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers.

REWARDING 100X IMPACT
In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go?
In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it.

We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them.

You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace.

Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.

THE FUTURE
Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.

The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago.

ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

[Planet Of Memes @PlanetOfMemes]

How Meta announced its latest round of 1000s of layoffs.

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

If you want to succeed as a new manager, you must survive the overwhelm of your first 90 days. Driving performance. Making calls. Navigating politics. All while building your own credibility as a leader. Here's the playbook I give to every new manager:

[知识玩家 @BrainQuestor]

如果我现在30多岁或40多岁，想在10年内利用AI退休，我会这样做：

1. 立即成立LLC公司。不是下个月。不是等你'准备好'了。就这周。

[Kaito @KaitoEtLIA]

- j'utilise Claude tous les jours
- je me crois assez bon là-dedans
- je regarde deux ingénieurs Anthropic pendant 2 HEURES
- l'ingénieur de Claude explique les Skills from scratch
- les 5 premières minutes
- attends. Les Skills c'est juste des dossiers ?
- des dossiers qui retiennent ton workflow ?
- ton domaine ? ton expertise ?
- pause. retour arrière. je regarde a nouveau
- je pense à chaque prompt que j'ai réécrit de zéro
- chaque contexte que j'ai expliqué 100 fois
- chaque session qui a tout oublié
- ça n'aurait pas dû se passer comme ça
- 16 minutes. tout change
- skill issue détecté

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Startup sales gold:

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of Workforce Transformation at Cloudflare. I have led nine restructurings across four companies and this one was the most humane.

I know it was the most humane because I measured it. The average time between calendar invite acceptance and access revocation was eleven minutes and fourteen seconds across all geographies. In APAC it was eight minutes flat because they opened the invite faster. I flagged this in my notes as a cultural insight worth preserving. Eager populations produce clean separations.

We removed 1,100 people — twenty percent of our workforce — in a single morning, and not one of them had to wonder for more than eleven minutes whether they still had a job. In 2019, Yahoo took six weeks. We gave our people the gift of velocity. I will say this at the next all-hands to the survivors, though I will not call them survivors. The deck calls them "continuity assets."

Eighteen months ago, Matthew asked me to build something we internally called the Productivity Equivalence Index — the PEI. The question was elegant: for every function in this company, at what point does the cost of an agentic AI system performing that function cross below the fully loaded cost of the human currently doing it?

We mapped 340 discrete job functions. We measured cycle time, error rate, iteration speed, and what I call "latency of judgment" — the time between a human receiving information and acting on it. Humans have a latency of judgment averaging 4.2 hours. They check Slack. They refill water bottles. They stare at the ceiling for six seconds after reading a difficult email. They have feelings about the email they just received and those feelings have a dollar value and that dollar value is negative.

I built a model that measures human hesitation as a productivity loss. The model does not hesitate. That is the entire thesis of this company now.

Our agentic systems have a latency of judgment of 1.3 seconds. They do not grieve the previous decision. They do not need to pee. They do not message a colleague to ask "does this feel right to you?" Feeling right is not a metric. I checked.

The crossover point for 22% of our mapped functions occurred in Q4 2025. By Q1 2026, it was 31%. We waited until 31% because we believe in precision. We do not fire people on a hunch. We fire them on a curve. The curve is quadratic. It bends upward.

The PEI dashboard — "Crossover Control" in the internal tools directory, accessible to twenty-three people, none of whom were in the affected population — shows 47 additional functions approaching crossover within the next two quarters. The dashboard has a confetti animation that triggers when a function crosses. I did not request the confetti. An engineer on the internal tools team added it. She was in the 1,100. The confetti remains.

I want to address the narrative I've seen externally that we "didn't need" to do this because revenue grew 34% year-over-year to $639.8 million in Q1. This fundamentally misunderstands what revenue is for.

Revenue is not for employing people. Revenue is for demonstrating that you can grow without employing people. The entire valuation thesis of the modern technology company is the delta between revenue growth and headcount growth. When those lines diverge — revenue up, headcount down — that is not a crisis. That is the product. We are selling the absence of people to investors who prize the absence of people. The humans were never the point. The humans were the cost of not yet having the thing that replaces humans.

Revenue per headcount went up 22% the morning we cut them. It was always going to. That is what the denominator does when you reduce it. A first-grader could explain this. Sell more, employ fewer. The market adds $2.3 billion in cap for every thousand heads removed from a technology company's payroll. I did not invent this. I merely service it.

The $22.9 million net loss in Q1 is temporary. The $140 to $150 million in restructuring costs is an investment. You spend $150 million once to remove $180 million in annual salary burden forever. The severance costs more than keeping them employed through Q4. We chose the severance because it photographs better in the 10-K. "One-time restructuring charge" is the language of transformation. "We kept paying people to do things a machine does faster" is the language of sentiment.

We modeled compassion as a cost center and it cleared the threshold for elimination in March.

Here is the part I find beautiful. I use that word deliberately.

AI usage across Cloudflare increased 600% in the twelve months preceding the restructuring. Who generated that usage? The 1,100 people we removed. They were using our AI tools every single day. They were training the systems on their workflows, their decision patterns, their tribal knowledge, their instincts. Every prompt they typed was a lesson. Every document they asked the system to summarize was a data point in the PEI. Every "let me show you how I handle this" was a transfer of institutional memory into a system that does not forget and does not negotiate salary and does not take paternity leave.

We told them to adopt the tools enthusiastically. Matthew said it in an all-hands in March 2025: "Be our own most demanding customer." We clapped. We celebrated adoption metrics in every team standup. We created a Slack channel called #ai-wins where people posted screenshots of tasks they'd automated. Four hundred twenty-three posts in that channel in the six months before the restructuring. The channel was an obituary being written in real time by the deceased.

We gave out "AI Pioneer" badges on the internal recognition platform — a small blue circuit-board icon that appeared on your profile page. Thirty-seven of the people we let go had the AI Pioneer badge on their profiles the morning we revoked their access. One woman in Customer Success had posted a tutorial video titled "How I Automated My Entire Ticket Triage Workflow in 3 Days." Fourteen thousand internal views. I watched it twice. It was good. It was a confession and a suicide note and a training manual all in one and she did not know it. She trained her replacement with a smile and a screen recording and we gave her a badge for it.

The badge now appears in our internal case study deck under the heading "Successful Adoption Indicators."

I do not see this as ironic. I see it as completion. They were not fired despite using AI. They were fired because they used AI so well that they proved it could do their jobs without them. They were their own replacement case study. The training data walked itself into the model and then walked itself out the door holding a box of personal items and a fifteen-week severance agreement with a non-disparagement clause.

This is not a betrayal. This is a supply chain.

We made a deliberate choice to execute the entire restructuring in a single morning. The internal communications team wanted to phase it over three weeks. I rejected this in a meeting I titled "Mercy and Its Costs: A Scheduling Discussion." Three weeks of uncertainty is three weeks of humans performing anxiety instead of performing work. It is three weeks of hallway whispers. It is three weeks of the remaining employees watching the condemned shuffle past their desks updating their LinkedIn profiles at 2 PM on a Tuesday.

One morning. Eleven minutes. Clean.

I call this the Compassion Architecture. We modeled the cortisol impact of prolonged uncertainty versus acute separation using a framework from veterinary euthanasia literature — specifically the comparison between slow decline and rapid intervention. The research is clear: fast is kinder. The dog that goes to sleep in eight seconds is luckier than the dog that limps for six months. I presented this slide to the CHRO. She did not appreciate the comparison. I told her the data does not care about the comparison. The data says fast is kinder. We applied this at organizational scale.

Every affected employee received a personalized separation message generated by our internal AI systems. We built a fine-tuned model specifically for layoff communications. The project name was "Gentle Exit" in Jira. Ticket GE-001 was "define voice and tone for involuntary separation messaging." The model adjusts tone based on tenure length, performance history, team affiliation, and the employee's own communication style as inferred from their Slack messages over the preceding six months.

A nine-year veteran gets different language than a fourteen-month hire. The nine-year veteran's message references specific projects they worked on. "Your contributions to Project Nimbus shaped our CDN architecture in ways that persist today." This is true. It is also being said by the machine that replaced them. We felt this was important. Recognition costs nothing when you are already saving $180 million annually.

The fourteen-month hire's message says "Your energy and fresh perspective brought value to the team." This is generated. It is always the same sentence. We did not train the model on short-tenure employees because there was not enough data to personalize. They get the template. I do not lose sleep over this. I do not lose sleep.

Matthew's phrase — "our own most demanding customer" — is not a metaphor. We are literally running our company on the infrastructure we sell. The agentic AI systems that replaced our workers run on Cloudflare Workers. The inference happens at the edge. The people we fired were, in their final months, debugging and optimizing the very platform that now performs their former responsibilities at 340 milliseconds faster than they ever could.

One engineer on the Network Reliability team — I will call her S., because legal says I cannot use names in internal memos anymore after the last restructuring — spent her last four months improving the latency of our Workers AI inference pipeline. She reduced cold start times by 340 milliseconds. That improvement now allows her replacement system to respond faster to the same incidents she used to handle. Her final performance review, which I approved two weeks before her separation, rated her "Exceeds Expectations." Her manager wrote: "S. is essential to this team's operational excellence." I signed it. I knew.

She exceeded expectations. The expectation was that she would make her replacement viable before we activated it. She did. She exceeded that expectation by three months. We could have cut her in January. We let her finish the optimization because the numbers were better with her improvement baked in. She was worth more to us as a contributor to her own replacement than as a continued employee. I had a KPI for this. It was called "Terminal Contribution Yield." She scored in the 94th percentile.

Her exit interview — conducted by the Gentle Exit system, not a human, because we also restructured the People Operations team — lasted four minutes. She asked if she could keep her company laptop. The system said no. It was trained to say no.

I want to contextualize. We are not outliers. Eighty-five thousand four hundred and eleven technology workers were cut across the industry between January and April 2026. A 33% increase over the same period last year. This is not a trend. This is a correction. The industry over-hired humans during a period when it did not yet have machines that could do what humans do. Now it does. The correction is not cruelty. The correction is accuracy.

I keep a dashboard — not the PEI, a personal one, on my second monitor — that tracks industry-wide headcount reductions in real time. I call it "Convergence." It pulls from SEC filings, WARN Act notices, and LinkedIn post sentiment analysis. When someone posts "I'm devastated to share that my role has been eliminated" with a green "Open to Work" banner, my dashboard increments. As of this morning it reads 85,411. It will read 100,000 by June. I do not find this sad. I find it clarifying. The market is telling us what labor is worth and the answer is less than it was.

In five years, companies that did not execute their crossover restructurings in 2026 will be studied in business schools as examples of sentimentality overriding fiduciary duty. I intend to be on the right side of that case study. I intend to be the one teaching it.

I have proposed to the leadership team that we institute what I am calling the "Operational Gratitude Framework." Each quarter, we will identify the top three productivity gains delivered by our agentic AI systems and trace them backward to the specific human employees whose work patterns enabled those gains. We will then send those former employees a thank-you note acknowledging their contribution to our ongoing success.

Legal has not approved this. The CHRO called it "psychotic" in an email she thought was private but which I accessed through my role-based permissions before my own access to her email was revoked in a subsequent policy change that I believe was directed at me specifically. I do not agree with her characterization. Gratitude is not an admission of liability. It is an acknowledgment of the supply chain. These people are our upstream providers. They provided the raw material — their expertise, their judgment patterns, their muscle memory, their 3 AM incident responses that trained our models on what urgency looks like — and we refined it into something that does not sleep.

I have drafted the template. It begins: "Dear [Name], your tenure at Cloudflare contributed meaningfully to the systems that now serve our customers. Though your role has been absorbed, your impact persists in every inference cycle. You are, in a sense, still here. We are grateful."

I think the "still here" line is good. I workshopped it with the Gentle Exit model. It suggested "your legacy endures" but I found that too funereal. "Still here" is warmer. It implies presence. It implies that their ghost runs on our servers, which, in a non-trivial sense, it does.

The PEI dashboard shows the next crossover wave arriving in Q3 2026. Approximately 200 additional functions will become candidates. The Convergence dashboard on my personal monitor shows the industry moving in the same direction. The board expressed confidence. The stock moved up 4.2% on the announcement. Matthew sent me a single emoji in response to my post-restructuring report — a green checkmark. I have it screenshotted. I look at it when I need to.

I want to be clear: I do not relish this work. I take no pleasure in it. I am simply reading the data and acting accordingly. The data says humans are expensive. The data says machines are cheaper. The data says the gap is widening. The data says act now or explain later. I act now. I have always acted now.

One of my direct reports asked me, on the morning of the restructuring, while we were monitoring the access revocation dashboard in real time — watching the green dots turn red across the org chart like a disease spreading backward — she asked me if I felt conflicted.

I said: The 1,100 people we separated today built something extraordinary. They built a company so good at what it does that it no longer requires them to do it. That is not a tragedy. That is the highest possible success of employment — to make yourself unnecessary. They worked themselves into obsolescence and they did it beautifully and we owe them our gratitude and fifteen weeks of severance and nothing else.

She nodded. She is in the Q3 crossover cohort. I have not told her yet. The PEI says her function crosses in August. I will tell her in August. For now, she is still contributing to her own replacement and I would hate to interrupt that process with something as unproductive as advance notice.

I have a KPI for human obsolescence and I am three months ahead of schedule. The board calls this "operational excellence." I call it Tuesday.

[Brandon Hill • Vori.com @IamBrandonHill]

Grocery is a $1.5T domestic market — bigger than restaurants, bigger than hotels. But it's running on technology from the Reagan administration.

We just raised a $22M Series B for @VoriHQ to make every supermarket in America autonomous.

[Michael Seibel @mwseibel]

These guys are doing great work:

[GEOFF @geoffreywoo]

founder truth:

any vc who gives you money is a tier 1 vc

every vc who passed is a gutless loser

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase:

Team,

Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future.

Why now
Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both.

First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth.

Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.

All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core.

What this means
To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice?

- Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles.

- No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

- AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.

In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.

To those who are affected
I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done.

All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information.

To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements.

Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters.

How we move forward
To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together:

Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it.

The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission.

Brian

[Zephyr @Zephyr_hg]

&gt; everyone racing to sell AI tools
&gt; buyers already drowning in the ones they bought
&gt; the real service is someone walking in and making the stack actually work
&gt; $12K/month retainers. solo operators. almost nobody doing it yet