Co-Founder and CEO @raiseyourwork, helping everyone find a workplace they love. Previously, Co-Founder @42Floors (acq in 2018) and #CRE Broker @Cushwake.
The jobs apocalypse is the Population Bomb of our time.
Instead we're seeing more hiring in the job most affected by AI: programming. That should have been clear and obvious to anyone with basic economics understanding and good handle on the history of technology but it's sadly lacking today.
Fear sells. It drives clicks. It drive engagements.
The jobs apocalypse scenario comes from catastrophizing personalities and people who think of life as a zero sum game. It's the same mistake the communist theorists made. They thought jobs and labor were fixed and there's nothing new under the sun. If we take one job that job is lost forever and that person is now useless.
Wrong.
Instead, what happens is that when something gets faster and cheaper we want more of it.
Much more.
There is so much software that we could not build before because there weren't enough skilled people and not enough time and it wasn't worth the time or money.
Now it is worth it because it is faster and cheaper.
Cheaper for SaaS builders, cheaper for individuals, cheaper for enterprises, cheaper for everyone.
That's why were are seeing programmer jobs tick upwards.
Right now we are not seeing juniors get hired but that is also always the case in a recovery. We just saw mass layoffs because of overhiring during COVID and cheap money printing that made lending essentially free. The unskilled, aka junior workers, are always the last hired. You want skilled verterans who can take on the new technology with experience and take off running not someone you have to train and babysit when you have been stuck in third gear for a few years.
Job populists on the hard left like Sanders and many of his mirrors on the populist hard right are the enemies of actual working economies and must be resisted at all costs. They hurt the very people they hope to help by clinging to the past and thinking of life as a zero sum game.
This increase in jobs is the reality that will increasingly play out over the next few years if AI keeps getting better, barring some other economic shock that changes the game. It will increasingly play out even when we have "geniuses in a datacenter."
It will be a shock to some. Just not the jobs shock they were expecting.
Sorry to disappoint but we're not getting UBI any time soon while the robots do all the jobs and you sit on your ass.
Seems like we are all going to have to work a bit longer.
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.
Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.
As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.
It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.
The bull case for the AI Revolution is abundance.
The “AI will end the world” narrative has gone viral and has quickly become the base case assumption.
However, if you look back at any time in history, innovation has largely yielded a net positive long-term outcome for humanity.
Innovation kills tasks, not people. In the bull case, humans work differently, productivity rises, costs fall, and scarcity declines.
As a result, the world can see less conflict over currently scarce resources, lower poverty rates, and improved living conditions.
A world full of abundance, peace, and efficiency is possible.
Humanity has always prevailed.
"My name's Raymond. I'm 73. I work the parking lot at St. Joseph's Hospital. Minimum wage, orange vest, a whistle I barely use. Most people don't even look at me. I'm just the old man waving cars into spaces.
But I see everything.
Like the black sedan that circled the lot every morning at 6 a.m. for three weeks. Young man driving, grandmother in the passenger seat. Chemotherapy, I figured. He'd drop her at the entrance, then spend 20 minutes hunting for parking, missing her appointments.
One morning, I stopped him. "What time tomorrow?"
"6:15," he said, confused.
"Space A-7 will be empty. I'll save it."
He blinked. "You... you can do that?"
"I can now," I said.
Next morning, I stood in A-7, holding my ground as cars circled angrily. When his sedan pulled up, I moved. He rolled down his window, speechless. "Why?"
"Because she needs you in there with her," I said. "Not out here stressing."
He cried. Right there in the parking lot.
Word spread quietly. A father with a sick baby asked if I could help. A woman visiting her dying husband. I started arriving at 5 a.m., notebook in hand, tracking who needed what. Saved spots became sacred. People stopped honking. They waited. Because they knew someone else was fighting something bigger than traffic.
But here's what changed everything, A businessman in a Mercedes screamed at me one morning. "I'm not sick! I need that spot for a meeting!"
"Then walk," I said calmly. "That space is for someone whose hands are shaking too hard to grip a steering wheel."
He sped off, furious. But a woman behind him got out of her car and hugged me. "My son has leukemia," she sobbed. "Thank you for seeing us."
The hospital tried to stop me. "Liability issues," they said. But then families started writing letters. Dozens. "Raymond made the worst days bearable." "He gave us one less thing to break over."
Last month, they made it official. "Reserved Parking for Families in Crisis." Ten spots, marked with blue signs. And they asked me to manage it.
But the best part? A man I'd helped two years ago, his mother survived, came back. He's a carpenter. Built a small wooden box, mounted it by the reserved spaces. Inside? Prayer cards, tissues, breath mints, and a note,
"Take what you need. You're not alone. -Raymond & Friends"
People leave things now. Granola bars. Phone chargers. Yesterday, someone left a hand-knitted blanket.
I'm 73. I direct traffic in a hospital parking lot. But I've learned this: Healing doesn't just happen in operating rooms. Sometimes it starts in a parking space. When someone says, "I see your crisis. Let me carry this one small piece."
So pay attention. At the grocery checkout, the coffee line, wherever you are. Someone's drowning in the little things while fighting the big ones.
Hold a door. Save a spot. Carry the weight no one else sees.
It's not glamorous. But it's everything."
Let this story reach more hearts....
Credit: Mary Nelson
I finally went to visit OpenAI's new building. It's the nicest office I've ever seen. So many different shaped spaces, and such good color. Whoever was in charge of this did a really good job.
1/ Jamie Dimon didn't just tell workers to RTO; he built a $3B skyscraper with gyms, Michelin-starred vegan meals, and an Irish pub.
If Wall Street's new HQ feels like a resort, that's because it basically is.
Let's get into the giant new office that's nearing completion.
Will AI be good or bad for office space markets worldwide?
Hard to say. Probably bad for many cities' office markets.
In the San Francisco Bay Area it has been great and growing rapidly.
2013 - 13 AI leases
2025 - 325 AI leases
This is kinda wild. I've lived in SF for 10 years, and even longer in the Bay Area, I've gone to lots of tech events, and I've never once seen a mayor of SF at a tech event before. Only now, seeing Lurie at a tech event, does it occur to me how bizarre that actually is.
San Francisco’s recovery is at risk.
How?
The Prop C gross receipts tax remains in place.
It makes San Francisco the least competitive city in America for medium-large businesses.
Until it goes away companies will continue to leave the city or cap their growth. It’s a tax on REVENUE above $50m.
The cost is simply too high. Any established company (the ones a city wants!) simply cannot justify paying for all their people to be in SF….. ask Stripe and every other Fintech company that already left SF.
A simple rule we should follow as a city, if a tax ultimately leads to less tax revenue because businesses and people leave and grow elsewhere, it’s stupid and should be repealed.
In this case, the stupidity is compounded because the tax revenue is used for ineffective harm reduction homelessness solutions aka subsided drug dens.
This should be the top priority for @DanielLurie’s administration.
If we don’t repeal this tax companies will emphasize growth outside of SF or move out entirely.
We don’t fix this, city revenue will never be safe and predictable.
I wish @Benioff could lead the charge on repealing this since he is responsible for getting it passed
For whatever reason, and I am not sure why, I’m never on these lists. Really, it should be Cyan & Scott as we work as a team, but either one of us ALONE should be in the top 10.
The "Invest SF Boom Loop Breakfast" event our team hosted last week was a hit!
We had some amazing speakers:
- SF Mayor @DanielLurie spoke about his 1st 100 days in office
- @BrookeJenkinsSF discussed her office's progress on public safety
- CEO of @SFGiants Larry Baer spoke
- @agarwal Agarwal the founder of @GrowSF discussed how/why Daniel Lurie and other moderates won their elections and what the next goals are
The goal of the event was to bring business, government, community leaders together to promote downtown SF's recovery. Mission accomplished!
The Big Takeaways from Invest SF:
- Crime is at a 23 year low in San Francisco ✅
- DA Brooke Jenkins & Mayor Daniel Lurie are awesome leaders ✅
- We raised $40,000 for Salvation Army ✅
- Over 320 attendees showed up. People are energized about SF ✅
Most importantly, it is clear that although the city has much work to do, the city is getting is mojo back.
Excited for San Francisco's future!
P.S. Big events are a lot of work. Our marketing team rallied to pull this off! I couldn't be prouder to be a part of a company with so much talent, that works so hard, and really cares about San Francisco. @JLL
Bet against San Francisco at your own risk.
It was an honor hosting the Invest SF Boom Loop Breakfast today.
We had @agarwal from @GrowSF , @BrookeJenkinsSF SF DA, @DanielLurie , @SFGiants CEO Larry Baer and many of the city’s business leaders in attendance.
We raised a ton of money for @SalvationArmyUS
San Francisco is getting its mojo back.
At Stand, we build models to understand and mitigate climate risk. Our work depends on an ecosystem of publicly available environmental data, now subject to risk of federal funding cuts. To protect that data and support climate research, we are introducing a Climate Data Commons.
It is with deep sadness but also with immense gratitude and love that I share the passing of my uncle Tom Bedecarré @tombed.
It is impossible to capture exactly what Tom meant to me. He literally saved my life. He helped me dream big. He was my mentor, my hero and my inspiration.
He was always the person I went to in life's big moments.
Almost 20 years ago when I was barely 20 years old, Tom stood behind me and gave me the courage to eulogize my mom, placing his hand on my shoulder and helped me honor my mom to hundreds of loved ones.
17 years ago when I had reached the absolute bottom of my life, Tom took me in and helped me get sober and get my life on track. He believed in me, when all evidence was to the contrary, and he showed me the path to living a full life with maximum postive impact on the world.
15 years ago, when I was ready to start my career, sober minded with big ambitions, he drove me into work every day and we would dream together how I could accelerate my career and build my business.
When I started Raise in the living room of my apartment, he and I would have hours-long calls late into the night, building the foundation for what would become my life's work.
Just over 5 years ago, when I was marrying the love of my life Ashely Bedecarre, Tom and Maggie hosted our ceremony and incredible party at their beautiful home in Woodside.
He taught me what it takes to make an impact and build a successful business. He taught me what true work ethic was and that there were no shortcuts to succeed in business, and in life. Get on a plane and visit your customers and your teams. Lead by example. Dream big and take risks even when, especially when, you challenge the status quo.
He changed an entire industry. He was Silicon Valley's Ad-Man. He was a legend and titan.
To me, he was my rock, my inspiration, my mentor.
I really don't know what life will be like without him, but I know I am a better leader, father, husband, and friend because of Tom.
I love you and already miss you and I will carry you with me for the rest of my life.
Thrilled to announce I'm joining @mike, @ann, and @iris at @FloodgateFund as a partner, investing in seed and pre-seed founders building the next thunder-lizard! (more below)