Could You Operate Your Company With Half The People?

Good afternoon…

Venture capitalist Thomasz Tunguz had a good post today explaining that ‘the game on the field has changed’. The gist…

For employees, there’s never been a better opportunity to meaningfully impact a company through the leverage of AI.

For founders, you should have a plan to operate even a growing business with half the people.

Both employees and employees need to stop blaming AI and start thaking it.

While not shocking to me or readers here (I hope), too many founders, CEO’s, venture and growth investors seem to be shocked that markets are punishing companies that have been sloppy, indecisive, stupid, even negligent with how they run their businesses.

As if the end of ZIRP, exploding costs of customer acquisition, tariffs, deglobalization and having two years of working AI behind us was not enough of a warning.

Yesterday, Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 of 10,000 of his Block/Square employees in one swoop - via his smartphone and a Twitter post, probably from a beach in Bali.

For some reason Jack did not fire himself. No real need since he has ‘class B’ voting shares so he is the Xi of his own debacle. Good investors have avoided Jack and his stock as you can see from chart below…but since Block is in the S&P 500, the indexers have had to put up with Jack’s shitty CEO’ing.

Not to pick on Jack alone, but what a putz. Not including the stupid $27 billion purchase of BNPL company Afterpay (congrats to those smart founders for selling), here is Jack’s resume at Square/Block (a company where he changes the ticker symbol it seems every year now $XYZ ( ▲ 15.12% ) )

The web 2.0 world is long over so hopefully this Square/Block/Jack Dorsey moment puts a nail in this organizational slop from that era once and for all.

The machines are now upon us 24/7/365 to both create slop (content) and on a mission to clean up the slop (actual business).

Back to work.