Alexandra Wicksell

Exec coach to VC-backed founders, investors, execs. Identity. Nervous system. Decisions. The internal work that sharpens how you lead, decide, and scale.

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

"We've swapped the motor. We have not yet redesigned the factory." Such a good piece on why AI is making individuals 10x more productive but companies no more valuable as a result.

[George Sivulka @gsivulka]

https://t.co/fdKmCTuaUk

[George Sivulka @gsivulka]

https://t.co/fdKmCTuaUk

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

productive individuals don't make productive firms. you're so right..
and the bottleneck is def now in the org design rather than the tech. but under org design is leadership. and under leadership is the quality of judgment. and judgment degrades when leaders are making decisions from noise.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Naval Ravikant: "You're going to die. It's all going to zero. What's there to stress about?"

"Stress is when your mind has two conflicting desires at once. You want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish. You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money. You have two conflicting desires, and that's stress."

Naval explains the difference between stress and anxiety:

"Anxiety is this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. The reason is you have so many unresolved problems that have piled up in your life, you can no longer identify what the problems are. There's this mountain of garbage in your mind. A little bit is poking out the top like an iceberg; that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things."

He shares his personal anxiety resolver:

"One big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. If you can keep that idea in front of you at all times, what's there to stress about?"

Naval reframes what "wasted time" really means:

"What is wasted time? Everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment, it's the only thing that matters. So if you're doing something you want to do and you're fully there for it it's not wasted time. If your mind is running away, wishing you were somewhere else, anticipating the future, regretting the past, that's wasted time. That's time you're not present for."

He concludes:

"People get worried about dying and no longer being here. But they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case."

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Jeff Bezos with a very powerful lesson on ideas - too many ideas can create a backlog of unfinished work and a business distraction

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

What's the most unexpected way AI has changed how you show up at work?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The best essay written about AI this year just dropped and nobody in tech wants to hear it.

Manidis names something most of the industry is allergic to discussing: the majority of AI deployment today produces the sensation of work, not work itself. He calls these “tool-shaped objects.” You can hold them, use them, watch tokens stream across your screen, monitor chain-of-thought reasoning, swap models, add tools, build agents that call other agents that generate memos nobody reads. The number goes up. The output doesn’t.

He compares it to FarmVille. No matter where you click, your farm expands. The direction of your effort is irrelevant. The experience of productivity is the product. And the market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive.

The data backs this up almost perfectly. McKinsey surveyed ~2,000 enterprises in 2025 and found 6% qualify as “AI high performers” with meaningful bottom-line impact. Six percent. Meanwhile enterprise AI spending went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. A 22x increase in two years. Larridin found 89% of enterprises use AI but only 23% even measure ROI. Most organizations literally cannot tell whether they’re running a farm or running FarmVille.

But here’s where it gets interesting. That 6% who figured it out? They’re seeing 3-4x higher productivity gains than beginners, redesigning entire workflows, and pulling away at a rate that makes the spending rational for everyone else as a defensive bet. OpenAI’s enterprise data shows workers in properly deployed organizations saving 40-60 minutes daily. Wharton found AI deals convert to production at 47%, nearly double the 25% rate for traditional SaaS.

So the tool-shaped object problem isn’t that the tool is fake. The problem is that 77% of organizations never built the measurement framework to know which side of the gradient they’re on. They’re spending because spending feels like strategy, not because they can connect tokens consumed to value produced.

This is how every general-purpose technology diffuses. Factories installed electric motors and wired them to the same belt-drive layouts they used with steam engines. Productivity didn’t move for 30 years. It took managers who understood that electricity meant redesigning the factory floor before output followed. The AI adoption curve looks nearly identical, just compressed.

The Mac Mini agent setups, the orchestration layers, the billion-dollar frameworks: these are belt-driven electric factories. They will be replaced. But by the 6% who redesigned the floor, not by people who saw the belt-drive phase and concluded the motor was decorative.

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

The technology is changing fast, human behaviour isn’t. I see this so often, implementing a new tactic/tools gets confused for actual behavioural change all the time. But real change requires identity level shifts, not just new inputs.

Different output ≠ different behaviour. You can basically consume a thousand tokens and still be the same person.

[Spitfire @RealSpitfire]

Ok. I was really caught off guard here. I did not expect my visceral reaction to this message from James Vanderbeek.

Do yourself a favor and listen. Just listen. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

RIP James, God speed🙏🏼

[Leaders 𝕏 Junction @LeadersJunction]

This is the power of writing things down

[Yasmine Khosrowshahi @yasminekho]

In 2010, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave a 1-hour masterclass on "Human Behavioral Biology."

He broke down how:
- Biology collapses moral
- Behavior changes w/o intention
- Mind & body rewrite each other

10 lessons that'll make you a master at human behavior:

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

Here’s the part people miss… obsession isn’t a personality trait, it’s a state – which means it can’t be summoned on command.
You can’t decide to be obsessed.
It appears when curiosity, identity, reward and meaning accidentally align.

[Chris Williamson @ChrisWillx]

https://t.co/jNpTcnvkkW

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Effective public speaking hack: Practice your talk while doing light cardio. On a jog, brisk walk, or stationary bike ride. Simulates the heart rate rise you’ll feel when you get in front of people. You’ll be ready for it. Practice the way you play.

[Alexandra Wicksell @awicksell]

Love the way you frame these questions:
Goals ask: What result do I want?
Systems ask: What daily behavior makes that outcome probable?

I’d add:
Identity ask: Who do I need to become so those behaviors become my default?

Identity is what actually bridges the gap between systems and results. When the self-image shifts, consistency stops requiring willpower.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated life lesson: Confidence is less about knowing you’ll win and more about knowing you’ll bounce back even if you don’t. Real confidence is built on resilience. Adaptability. Tolerance for uncertainty. Fear loses when you embrace that failure is never final.

[Kevin Aluwi @kaluwi]

Deeply relate to this. When we went public at $28b 3 years ago, IPO day filled the emotional void for about 30 minutes. Throughout the 9 years of building a company, I was mostly fueled by anger and an "I'll show you" energy. Now that I'm no longer doing that, the struggle is how to find fuel that isn't as destructive. I don't think the startup community talks enough about how often builder energy comes from dark places.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

The older I get, the more I realize you can get pretty far in life by just finishing things. The world is full of half-written books, half-built businesses, and half-kept promises. You stand out by closing loops. By doing what you said you’d do. By having the courage to finish.

[Yasmine Khosrowshahi @yasminekho]

Naval Ravikant revealed the trait that creates more success than intelligence ever could:

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

During our seed round in 2020, an investor laughed when I was pitching, called Gamma "the worst idea I've ever heard," and hung up mid-call.

We've now raised at a $2.1bn valuation.

This is the story and every fundraising lesson I learned: