AI can turn employees into internal entrepreneurs

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:10

   Yeah, when I first came to the corporate world, one thing that I found extremely depressing is uh how atomized and siloed people are so you know over time uh you know with capitalism sort of emerging you have the original i think adam smith like how do you make a pencil right like someone make an eraser and so people become sort of cogs in the machine and i don't think that is conducive to the human spirit like i think humans are fundamentally creative i think anytime we assume the shape of a machine i think people are actually not happy in their lives i'm not a marxist but i've read some marx and marx has the theory of alienation and the theory the i think marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism maybe not the solutions um definitely not the solution yeah the one of his critiques is alienation

2. 40:07

   is that you don't uh you don't see the fruits of your work you you you build one part of one part of one part of part of a large supply chain of of things right and that doesn't make people proud of like like i said when i was a kid when i built this entire thing and my my brother used it that's amazing that's i think what what being human is about and so i think now we're at an opportunity there's an opportunity in the workplace to a lot of that standardization stuff to be taken care by agents by work process automation and all that stuff and what's left for people yes we'll have broad swim lanes like i'm generally in design but i can code i can write a you know prd using chat GPT or whatever. I can even have a marketing idea and I can like use all the tools and like, Hey, I built like this, this marketing package. And that to me is a lot more exciting. So we,

3. 41:03

   we have, for example, one of our customers, large enterprise, one person had an idea. It's a, it's a, you know, real estate marketplace where they connect real estate buyers with real estate agents, had an idea on how to optimize that algorithm and couldn't get engineering resources. Now, previously, it was just that. The idea is that although he's in the business, he understands it. He talks to real estate agents all the time.

4. 41:28

   Instead, he went to Replit. He built a new routing algorithm that drove tens of millions of dollars, if not $100 million to the business. And that person got promoted again and again and again and again. And now he's sitting with the board members, guiding their AI strategy. Entrepreneurship, I think, in my opinion, is not just about building businesses. You can be an activist entrepreneur. you can be a humanitarian entrepreneur, you can be an entrepreneur inside a large business.

5. 41:54

   And I promise you, your life will be a lot more interesting, exciting, you'll meet a lot more exciting people, you'll have a better reputation, you'll have a halo around you. So my hope for the future of corporate work, but humanity in general, is that as the boring things, the automated things actually taken care of by machines, we're left to be more entrepreneurial and more creative. obviously totally hope that's the case it goes back to my very first book the startup of you