TLDR: AI-native CEO’s are capitalizing on two things; rebuilding existing businesses more efficiently, and tackling adjacent possibilities to create things that never could have existed before.
The future of business is decentralized, unbundled, and stitched together with lots of tiny companies and technologies.
For the last 15-20 years we’ve been undergoing three major shifts in business broadly; 1) cloud, 2) B2B SaaS, 3) mobile.
Cloud lowered costs and improved access to building and buying.
B2B software went after every nuance and use case within an organization.
Mobile brought the cloud and software into our pockets.
All three improved everything about running a business.
The costs and technical infrastructure improved. The ability to create specialized solutions exploded. And my professional (Blackberry) generation became the one to take work with us everywhere we went.
These dynamics led to a new type of CEO in the 2000’s.
The product-led CEO.
These user-focused leaders built the product-led growth (PLG) playbook, and in turn won massive chunks of tiny markets, and then built incredible companies using the leverage of that strong core.
They built thousands of incredible companies, and the VC market exploded.
But these companies from the cloud-saas-mobile generation are built on the infrastructure of yesterday.
They’ve ballooned their workforces with all kinds of roles and antiquated tech.
Incredible amounts of middle management—something Elon Musk doesn’t do by the way.
Massive SDR, AE, RM, and CSM teams.
Hilariously large recruiting & HR functions.
Strategists and data analysts galore.
All of this stuff makes a lot of sense in a world where profit margins are 80-90%, use cases for software are endless, and humans are willing to work for 1/10th of the value they produce in return for a stable job and Silicon Valley esque benefits.
But we’re entering a new world, and I’m seeing a new breed of CEO set to capitalize on it.
These new CEO’s don’t just build products in AI, they build their entire companies leveraging AI.
This isn’t a CEO who is simply setting out to solve a problem, it’s a CEO who is inhaling knowledge related to AI, and embedding it into every function across their organization.
This new generation of CEO’s is not just team building, but system building.
Tech companies have long built their own software in house, leveraging their own data, and building homegrown tools to enable them to move faster and with strategic advantages.
And of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Even Xerox had tools to autogenerate proposals when I worked there more than 12 years ago. And at LinkedIn, the tools were on an entirely different level—auto-generated websites with customer assets, predictive analytics, proprietary data, alerts for salespeople, and I won’t bore you, but some really cool stuff. For my LI people; go links, Merlin, Crystal Ball, Magic Wand… and many more I’m forgetting the names of, but you know what I’m talking about.
But now, this new generation of CEO doesn’t need to build homegrown software—everything will be stitched together with AI tooling, and systems that talk to one another.
These new CEO’s aren’t only experts in their domain, but when it’s time to hire a sales development rep they’re going to tools like Valley for instance, backed by General Catalyst, and returning 30-50% response rates using conversational selling rather than endless and buyer-predatory static mass outreach cadences.
But that’s just one example.
Data analysts? Try querying your data lake with visualization tools.
Copywriters? Nope.
Marketers? Machines are better at A/B testing, particularly when images and videos are automatically generated too, and models compete with one another on performance.
Recruiting teams will be decimated both because the function is automatable and because the organization needs less people.
These new CEO’s aren’t just hiring for people who can do the core job the way it used to be done. They’re hiring autodidacts—people inhaling knowledge about AI, and leveraging tools that they can use to be 10X more efficient.
These new CEO’s are competing with companies who have already proven demand, but they’re rebuilding from the ground up with so much efficiency in their organization that incumbents simply won’t be able to compete on price.
Think about Amazon and bookstores.
Amazon competed on price & selection because bookstores couldn’t carry infinite titles and their brick & mortar overhead handcuffed them to pricing at a level that Amazon could easily undercut.
These are structural advantages to a business model, not just a hype cycle of new technology.
The same is true of blockchain. Crypto winter aside, smart contract & zero knowledge infrastructure will completely change industries.
Take AminoChain for instance. Backed by a16z, AminoChain turns the inventory management systems of biobanks into shoppable specimen centers so healthcare organizations and researchers like Pfizer, Roche, and Harvard can shop for biomaterial like blood samples and stem cells.
Tracking tracing and incentivizing participation in science wasn’t even structurally possible until now.
The common thread here is not a change in customer needs, it’s a change in technology available for builders and the make-up of their organizations.
These new companies are building in what we call “adjacent possibilities” — things that become possible only after new innovations are made available to build with.
Look at HIFI for example, backed by Blockchain Founders Fund. Stripe announced a move into stablecoin for consumer payments, but we all know that the more durable and more interesting business model is B2B. Enter HIFI, automatically wrapping any currency in stablecoin and instantaneously transacting in any other currency, eliminating long settlement times, extortion-level fees, and cross-currency issues like tax reporting and foreign exchange. The entire business world will transact on stablecoin someday. It’s structurally more efficient and more compelling… by lightyears.
These CEO’s are a new generation.
They’re AI-first and crypto-native CEO’s. They’re not simply creating chat interfaces with AI wrappers or using crypto to trade NFT’s, but instead they’re building structurally durable businesses that produce real value for customers—for businesses.
And there will be literally zero industries untouched by this phenomenon.
Take Dune Security as another example. Backed by Craft. How do you test and measure if your employees are putting your organization at risk? Automated penetration testing and employee tracking. Automated campaign creation. Automated and personalized cybersecurity awareness training. And it doesn’t end there. Automate the creation of the training videos themselves. Translate them into any language instantly. Provide immediate response times. Calculate individual employee-level risk and engage those employees intelligently. And do it all with a staff of AI-native geniuses.
The future is already here.
The AI-native CEO is a new breed.
They’re not just a product visionary and talent magnet, but a company builder and system-level thinker, an autodidact challenging the conventional ways of the relatively high-overhead company building from the previous two decades.
Just wait. It’s going to be electric.
See you Monday.