Top Tweets for #HumanCapitalMatters

The researchers getting rich off Anthropic secondaries are cheering for the thing that would make them ordinary employees again. Right now they are paid like NBA free agents because they are the labs’ most visible moat. The frontier labs are struggling to hold a durable, ownable edge: models get copied, undercut, or matched by cheaper and open rivals within months. So the real advantage lives in a few hundred people who know how to push the frontier, and who can also leave, raise billion-dollar, double tranched seed rounds, and compete directly. That is why the labs are paying them not to leave. with secondaries as retention payments, mission / fear, etc... Pharma shows where this can end up. In a drug company, the value does not belong to the scientist. The scientist can be paid well, but not hundreds of millions over three or four years, because the durable value sits in the patent and the FDA approval. The researcher who discovered the molecule can quit tomorrow, but the company still owns the asset. A regulatory moat would do something similar for AI labs. It would move value from the person to the institution. Regulation is a wall against three threats at once: competitors, open source, and the labs’ own researchers. The researchers getting rich off secondaries today are, by cheering the regulated future, voting to end the exact leverage that made them rich.

99% of VCs on my feed is parroting the same stuff: "The Agentic Era is here. Teams of 3 will build $100M companies, and management is dead." My side is different. I have spent the last 20 years in the trenches, scaled organizations across 4 continents, and looked at many many P&Ls. This idea that managers won't matter in an AI world is completely laughable. I get the Silicon Valley purists theory telling you that "Agent Orchestration Layers" (basically AI managing AI) will solve world hunger..... They think Team A's agent will automatically negotiate timelines and APIs with Team B's agent, completely eliminating the need for a human middleman. For basic technical coordination, they may end up being right - the "just checking in on your status" manager will be absolutely dead - but do they realize that AI making it 10x cheaper and easier to achieve massive output, will result into MORE teams? Instead of 2 massive, bloated departments, a company is going to have 50 hyper-lean specialized human-agent squads. More teams mean more fragmentation. Agents can sync data endpoints, but they cannot handle political alignment, resource competition, corporate vision, budget reallocation because of bad press. Let me tell you who will steer the ship when 50 micro-teams are all sprinting in different directions competing for the same capital and brand equity. Humans!! Tech optimists say "Well, the baseline LLMs are a utility, but the companies with proprietary data flywheels will be superior." Sure, great theory. But who curates that data? Who decides which workflows to build? Everyone has access to the same top-tier models! The differentiator defaults right back to humanity. You categorically CANNOT take humans out of the equation and somehow expect unique, market-defining innovation. The moat is the organizational design that allows your people to direct the machine better than the competition. And so I think we are heading into a hybrid period that is going to take a solid 5 to 10 years to fine-tune. Managers aren't going away but their role will change. As a manager, you may no longer managing daily tasks, but more a complex ecosystem of human psychology and high-velocity algorithmic execution. Think about the leverage: if a human employee messes up, it takes a few days to notice. If an autonomous agent messes up, it cascades across your entire enterprise in 4s. The room for error is ~0. The headcount of traditional middle management is possibly going to shrink (to be seen though... Always remember the Scaled Agile promises....), but in any case the importance of managers will be off the charts. Don't buy the hype. Great management is about to become the ultimate unfair advantage.