Editor’s note: This column is the second in a three-part series. Read part one here. Part three will publish tomorrow.
By Mark Himmelsbach and Remy Pinson
We’re not doomsday thinkers. The truth is, we can’t afford to be, because founders rarely have that luxury. Instead, we make decisions in real time with clients, teams and cash flow.
But the signals around us are loud, and getting stronger.
Startups like Cursor, Lovable and Mercor each operate with small teams and outsized output. Humanoid robots are being built explicitly to replace labor. Amazon and Microsoft have cited automation or AI as contributing factors in recent reductions in force. Whether every case is perfectly causal isn’t the point — the direction is unmistakable.
So what about the companies in the middle? Not fully AI-native. Not legacy. Actively transforming in real time.
A reply to Naval Ravikant’s leverage blog post captured the moment with dark humor: “Private equity firms have entered the chat.”
It’s funny but clarifying. If a PE firm were leading our transformation, they’d restructure aggressively around speed, automation and product velocity. Many roles — potentially including ours, even as founders — would be redesigned or replaced.
Welcome to the modern dilemma faced by nearly every existing founder, CEO and management team on the planet.
Everyone is experimenting with AI partly out of curiosity but mostly out of fear — fear of being left behind, losing business, missing the next shift. No one, however, agrees on what “AI is coming” actually means. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicts abundance; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts chaos. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Meanwhile, leverage is becoming nonlinear, just as Ravikant warned. Highly leveraged individuals can create exponentially more output than peers. Society, however, isn’t built for exponential asymmetry, and most companies aren’t either.
Which is precisely why culture is so important. We’re definitively reorganizing work and what it means to be professional, yes, but we must also reorganize culture in order to succeed.
Nearly all AI commentary focuses on operations — efficiency, automation, productivity, tools, workflows. But what of culture — the real operating system of a company — within organizations?
We have now over-indexed on the operational, rational, intellectual, left-brain paradigm. Ironically, we’re doing so precisely as intelligence gets commoditized. We must now concern ourselves with its reciprocal.
- How do teams build trust when AI handles core work?
- What does “contribution” mean when output is hybrid?
- How do you maintain belonging when leverage increases?
- What does creative authorship look like between humans and machines?
- How do you preserve dignity, identity and motivation?
These are cultural questions. And we don’t have established norms, language or frameworks for them yet. The cultural gap is the founder’s dilemma hiding in plain sight.
Mark Himmelsbach is the co-founder of the world’s newest creative AI marketing tool, RYA. He’s also the co-founder of Episode Four, an advertising agency that leverages data to make hits for Visa, Invesco QQQ, Charles Schwab, AT&T and many other marquee brands. Over the past two decades he has led cross-functional teams and developed multidiscipline communications and creative strategies for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Himmelsbach is a MBA graduate from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Remy Pinson is head of business development at WestComms. He strongly believes that high-quality communication will only continue to appreciate in value and supports clients working in AI, crypto and frontier technologies. Pinson still keeps a regular hand-written journal, loves wine and earned a degree in economics and philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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