Richard Yan

@laughdao | @blockdebate | @chinatown2_0

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

Sorry, I know many of you are very busy and important, but I need you all to stop what you're doing and watch this video until the end. Please.

[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.

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

@_tigerbyte @BillAckman @benitoz 🤣

[Laura Shin @laurashin]

I’m getting a lot of pushback for my support of Cuomo, the sexual harasser, so let me explain.

My ancestors made a very brave decision to flee from what is now North Korea in the mid-1940s shortly after Kim Il Sung came into power in Pyongyang. They were high ranking, had a big house with a grand piano, but a very smart and prescient ancestor of mine knew Communism was a bad idea and risked the lives of the entire family to get to freedom/democracy/capitalism. My mom was born in what eventually became South Korea a year later, and then she moved here in her early 20s and that’s how I came to be.

South Korea over North Korea might seem like an obvious choice in hindsight but I assure you in the mid-1940s, this was not. In fact this ancestor would not be vindicated for another 30/40 years. Look at this graph of economic development in North Korea vs South Korea.

I don’t think top down governance works great. I think capitalism and democracy work together in a way to unleash human creativity that fosters a lot of growth. I like that Mamdani has identified important problems. I don’t like that he thinks he can fix it all with top down solutions.

Do I love that the only other viable choice is Cuomo? I do not. But I also lived in the Bay Area both in the 1990s and in the 2010s, so I’m intimately aware of its fall from a wonderful place to a dystopia that I absolutely dread going to. This is yet another reason I oppose Mamdani.

NYC is one of my absolute favorite cities on Earth. I don’t want to see it become anything even remotely like the Bay Area or inch closer to any socialist country.

I could go on (please look up what happened in Buenos Aires after Milei ended the exact type of housing policies Mamdani is proposing — basically rents came down), but if you’re thinking of voting for Mamdani, please just think about whether you’d rather NYC inch more toward Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea or the Bay Area or away from them.

After this election, let’s hope that the next election features actual palatable candidates.

[Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut]

if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Reminds me of this line from @tylercowen:

[Paul Graham @paulg]

There is something deeply wrong with Twitter. It has always been rough here, but in the past year it has become an even worse kind of nasty. Do you think maybe it's time to try to turn things around, Elon?

[Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company @costplusdrugs]

With our transparent pricing, more people can access the medications they need.

Get started at https://t.co/DbEuAEZQYV.

[Mark Zandi @Markzandi]

We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.

[Anne Wojcicki @annewoj23]

1/ Last year, I lost my sister Susan to lung cancer.

Lung cancer in people who never smoked is the 5th leading cause of cancer globally. It kills more people than breast, colon, and prostate cancer combined.

Today at 23andMe, we’re announcing steps to accelerate breakthroughs:

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The Trump administration has suspended the funding of Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA.

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

https://t.co/3htHHqmGDl

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

Bullish about the largest advanced manufacturing park to be built in Solano, CA!

[The Blockchain Debate Podcast 🤓 @BlockDebate]

I think Adam Back is cashing out his BTC holdings (30,000 BTC priced at a premium) by selling to the Cantor SPAC. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not sugar-coat this - an OG reducing his bag.

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

My first two words on this particular Sunday morning were "Hallelujah!” followed by, “Amen!”

I was not in church when I uttered them. I was at my kitchen table, watching the CEO of the most valuable company in the world say precisely what mikeroweWORKS has been espousing for the last sixteen years. In other words, this is what I look like before coffee, when I find myself in violent agreement with a multi-billionaire.

If you haven’t already heard, a massive challenge is upon us. With regard to artificial intelligence and the energy we need to feed it, America will either change its current direction, or get left far, far behind. I know this because I run a modest foundation that has been arguing for decades that the portion of our workforce most often described as “the skilled trades,” will become the most essential component of our economy, our independence, and our collective future.

Well, the future is here.

Obviously, I didn’t know that the race to dominate artificial intelligence would be the thing that finally galvanized the folks at the grown-up table. When I founded mikeroweWORKS in 2008, I figured it would be a new commitment to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure that would necessitate a collective push to reinvigorate the trades. That need is still pressing, but I never imagined the most urgent cry for more welders and electricians would be ushered in by the need for more data centers. Back then, I didn’t even know what a data center was. But today, here we are. Data centers are headline news, because they are – as Jensen Huang says - AI factories. And if we want to remain competitive with China, we need to build thousands of them. Now. And presently, we simply don’t have the workforce to do it.

I’ll be discussing all of this next Tuesday in Pittsburgh, at the Energy and Innovation Summit, which is turning out to be a pretty high-profile event. https://t.co/kikptD2Ddg looks like I’ll be joining a panel of elected officials, including the President, and dozens of well-known CEO’s to discuss Pennsylvania’s role in the energy renascence. A lot of money is being invested in Pennsylvania, (a LOT), and my message to those writing the checks will be no different than it’s been since we launched mikeroweWORKS:

"Set some of that money aside to make a more persuasive case for the work itself. The skilled trades need better PR, and they need it on a national level. The country needs to see thousands of examples - real world examples - of men and women who have prospered as a result of learning a skill that's in demand."

I first made this point to President Obama in an open letter to The White House in 2009, shortly after he promised 3 million “shovel-ready” jobs in his Highway Infrastructure Act. https://t.co/EfgyUOX7m6 I was rooting for the President back then, and offered to use Dirty Jobs and mikeroweWORKS as vehicles to help promote his initiative. I did so because I was skeptical that people would line up to take those jobs simply because they were "created."

“Filling three million shovel-ready jobs,” I wrote, “will be a lot easier if people feel enthused about the prospect of picking up a shovel. Investment alone, won’t create that kind of enthusiasm.”

The White House did not respond to my offer.

Understandably, most presidents do not seek the advice of marginally famous cable television hosts best known for crawling through sewers. But it’s worth remembering that the unemployment rate back then was over 10%. Millions of people were newly unemployed, and I think the former President assumed that creating three million shovel-ready jobs would translate to three million people going back to work. But that’s not what happened. Because back then, even with record high unemployment, there were 2.3 million open jobs, most of which did not require a four-year degree. Nobody wanted to talk about that. Today, that number is more like 7.6 million. Nobody wants to talk about it now, either.

This is why I'm going to Pittsburgh. Just as I was rooting for President Obama in 2009, I’m rooting for President Trump today. I hope he succeeds in reinvigorating our industrial base and reshoring our manufacturing capabilities, and I want to offer my support. But if he does succeed, we’re talking about millions new jobs in manufacturing alone. And currently, there are over 400,000 jobs in that sector that are currently open, begging the obvious question...
If we can’t fill the openings we have, how will we fill the one’s we’re about to create?

That’s the question I’ll pose in Pittsburgh.

I’ll let you know if anyone has an answer.

Mike

PS. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this change is truly upon us, and I've had a front row seat. Over the last six months, mikeroweWORKS been flooded with inquiries to collaborate on various recruitment initiatives and multiple industries. I mean, flooded. Not a week goes by that I don't hear from an industry leader who has come to the realization that they’ve gone as far as they can go without more skilled labor. Panic, is not too strong a word. The Maritime Industrial Base for instance, is currently tasked with delivering three nuclear powered submarines to the Navy every year for the next decade, and looking to hire 140,000 tradespeople. 140,000!!!

“Do you know where they are?” they asked me. “We’ve looked everywhere.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know where they are. They’re in the 8th grade.”

I’ve had similar calls with the automotive industry, who needs 80,000 technicians and collision repair workers. Every single home service company is hiring – from foundation repair to roofing. The energy industry is looking for hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, and so too is the construction industry. A few weeks ago, at something called The Aspen Ideas Festival, I heard Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, say we’re short 500,000 electricians. A few months before that, at an Energy Conference in Newport, I heard Governor Rick Perry describe the race to build data centers and catch up to China with all things AI as nothing short of a “modern-day Manhattan Project.”

I think he's right.

Part of the problem is an aging demographic. For every five skilled workers who retire, two replace them. That’s why we need to engage with eighth graders today. Maybe even before that. We have to make a persuasive case for these jobs to the next generation, and just as importantly, to their parents. That won’t solve the immediate problem, but this is marathon, not a sprint, and these jobs need to be magnified and amplified at an early age. The more immediate problem is the labor force participation rate.

As we speak, millions of able-bodied Americans - for all sorts of reasons - are not working and not looking for work. According to economist Nick Eberstadt, that number is close to 7 million able-bodied men. https://t.co/vDmVeDbtI3 I’m not sure what to do about that, but it’s a colossal problem that needs to be addressed.

On the positive side, our last round of work ethic scholarships generated unparalleled interest. This year, mikeroweWORKSwill award $5 million to help train the next generation of skilled workers. That's ten times the number of qualified applicants we got this time a year ago. The needle is moving, and I believe we can move it a lot further, with a little help from the companies most incentivized to see the trades reinvigorated.

Should be a lively conversation in The Keystone State…

[The Blockchain Debate Podcast 🤓 @BlockDebate]

Tokenized stocks - is the endgame to sell private stocks without the burden of disclosure requirements?

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

Update:

Spoke to veterans of the industry. TLDR = Concentrated custody risk is concerning, but there are effective mitigants to consider:

* It's harder to get away with large-scale theft (fiat and stablecoin off-ramps are centralized and trace-able)

* If the concern is that custody services were as shoddy as the customer services (ala Coinbase) - some funds undertook thorough due diligence and concluded the former was hardcore and more than cleared the bar

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

Bitcoin related concern:

How are y’all thinking about security risks of concentrated bitcoin custody?

For example, Coinbase currently holds around 10% of BTC supply — compromising private keys could have similar implications as the ETH DAO hack.

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

Lastly, I haven’t heard of external oversight of custody services (eg Coinbase, Fidelity, Anchorage etc). I feel like some sort of regular third-party audit service would serve the industry. Thoughts?

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

(Screenshot from Matt Levine's newsletter)

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

Tokenized stock really just means "let's sell stock without complying with US disclosure rules" (the blockchain benefits of self custody, fractional ownership, 24-hour trading offer minor benefits and are detractors)

Eg - Robinhood now selling OpenAI tokenized shares

[Richard Yan @Gentso09]

@ruima @JMChen I feel seen!