Hey there, welcome to the Scaling Cross
Borders podcast and newsletter. I’m Greg
Moran. I’m an entrepreneur, investor,
founder, coach, and author of the
adaptive innovator, which just came out
a couple weeks ago. In the next five
minutes, I’m going to really blitz
through Sam Samman’s Alman’s recent
essay called The Gentle Singularity. I’m
going to try to hand you the must know
moves for founders today based on Sam’s
concepts from this article. If you
haven’t read it, look it up. you can
find it easily. Um, really interesting
look at what the future of AI holds for
us. So, first to get started, I want to
talk about why AI today, why the 2020s
are different than other, you know,
large shifts that we’ve seen in uh in
technology. So, there’s four seismic
shifts that really set this decade
apart. First, it’s really about
expertise for pennies. Large language
models deliver near PhD reasoning at the
cost of electricity. Headcounts no
longer the bottleneck. Imagination is
second. It’s self-improving technology.
Every training run without with an LLM
or AI teaches us how to build the next
better model. Research cycles end up
collapsing from weeks to days and years
to months.
It’s just that collapse of time in the
cycle time is really something like
we’ve never seen before. Third, it’s
about instant roll out. New AI features
hit global APIs overnight. There’s no
hardware delay. There’s no shipping
crates moving. And fourth, it’s the
combination of energy and intelligence
and their convergence. Cheaper renewals
plus smarter optimization unlock new
markets. So from materials to biotech,
they’re unlocking them all at once. So
what this cocktail means is that the
rate of change this decade dwarfs the
dotcom or mobile eras like we’ve never
seen before. So second major point that
the agentic AI era really will redefine
startups. Autonomous agents are going to
shift us from co-pilot to colleague. A
lean fivep person team is going to be
able to orchestrate hundreds of software
agents handling legal filings, growth
experiments, code deployments around the
clock. This is going to build staff-like
companies, which means lower burn and
faster pivots, which are critical for
startups. It’s also going to mean
24-hour product cycles. So, agents are
going to ideulate, they’re going to
build and ship all while you’re sleeping
in any part of the world. And it’s going
to build elastic, really elastic or
charge, which means that work is going
to be routed to whoever and wherever can
finish it the fastest. And this is going
to equal capital efficiency like we’ve
never seen. Investors like myself care
about early revenue, not employee count,
right? It’s going to cut down on burn
rates and really accelerate the pace
that we can move. Profitability will
again mean something.
So, this is going to be about master
agent orchestration and you’re going to
outexecute teams 10 times your size.
We’re going to start to see s teams with
single digits doing a billion plus in
revenue. We’ve never seen anything like
that before. Third major point human
advantage when intelligence is cheap
it’s going to be about even even with
super smart machines forefounders are
going to superpower forefounders uh
really their superpowers are going to
remain priceless right it’s going to be
about problem selection only humans are
going to be able to really sense which
pains are worth solving humans are also
going to be responsible for taste and
narrative they’re going to create
they’re going to still craft the stories
and experiences is
that move people. That’s a human art.
It’s going to remain a human art at
least for now. And that it’s going to be
that the human role in this is going to
be about relationship alchemy. Right?
We’ve got to trust networks, customers,
partners, investors are going to form
around authenticity, not algorithms. And
fourth, only humans are going to be able
to deliver ethical judgment. That means
deciding what should be built, not just
what can be built, but what should be
built. than that to really protect your
brand and your soul, your company’s
soul, right? You got to double down on
those things. That’s a human element and
you’re going to stay irreplaceable as a
founder, as a leader. And the fourth
major area that Sam talks about, I think
it’s really important to be thinking
about is governance and alignment. You
need to really understand this now,
right? Because the governance around AI
is going to change rapidly. Speed
without a safety net is a train wreck
waiting to happen. So there’s really
four moves you need to be thinking
about. You want to keep humans in the
loop by default for any really high
impact agent action until that
reliability is really proven. Critical
that humans are staying involved in
that. You want to be thinking about red
team about how to red team every
release. Think about actively trying to
break your own models for bias, privacy
leaks or misuse. Right? You want to be
the one to break it. Third, you want to
be thinking about radical transparency,
meaning like publish model cards, data
use disclosures to really earn trust
before regulators force you to do it.
Stay on the leading edge of this. At
five, you really want to be thinking
about shared off upside. And this means
like offering
offering really cooperative and
tokenized ownership so early users can
benefit with you. That’s what
decentralization, distributed power is
really going to become a moat. So that’s
a fiveminute download of Sam’s essay.
Read it if you haven’t read it.
Intelligence is racing toward free, but
insight, taste, trust, and integrity are
more human than ever. That’s going to be
a really inc that’s going to be a really
essential part of this. So nail that mix
and you won’t just survive what Sam
calls a gentle singularity, but you’re
going to shape it. So if this flash
briefing really helped, subscribe, share
it with a founder who can benefit. And
to really up your leadership game, check
out my new book called The Adaptive
Innovator. The links are in the notes.
I’m Greg Moran. Keep building and we’ll
see you next time.
