Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:28:03 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:03] S0: So I think there's a lot of truth to that. Find the conversation around the number of people per company, think that's I clear. I think it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. I do believe smaller teams will be able to accomplish more, but if you take things out to their maximum, there are going to be companies that know how to leverage those people in phenomenal ways that dramatically increase their value. And so, I don't know. We'll see if companies get smaller not. [00:28:36] S2: That's a hot take. They're like, you're not... And by the way, that makes sense. Maybe companies don't get, you know, the the one person trillion dollar company.
00:28:36 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:28:36] S2: That's a hot take. They're like, you're not... And by the way, that makes sense. Maybe companies don't get, you know, the the one person trillion dollar company. [00:28:45] S0: I think both things will be true is is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. There'll be some of those and we'll make a huge deal about them on X, but I think they'll also be enormous companies where the people are incredibly productive. Just some quick predictions. I think people will be making a lot more money individually than they are now. Wow. Because when you think about the yield of a company, the yield of people going up, their productivity going up, the yield of a company going up, companies should be making more money. Where do those dollars fall? Are they going go to the bottom line or back to shareholders? I actually think that we've seen nothing yet on the war for top talent. I think what's about to come is a whole other level Wow. Which is gonna benefit individual workers in a in a tremendous way. I'd also say the shape of companies, and this is sort of a odd point, so stay with me, is gonna change where when you think about like an org chart, it's basically like a triangle. I think it's possible we see different shapes for organizational hierarchy that are a little bit more circular in nature. If anyone... You can picture the pizza pie or like... I I like to think of a trivial pursuit, the piece with all the little ones that kinda slot in that you can, like, move around and reshape an organization that way that sort of moves outwards from the center.
00:28:45 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:45] S0: I think both things will be true is is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. There'll be some of those and we'll make a huge deal about them on X, but I think they'll also be enormous companies where the people are incredibly productive. Just some quick predictions. I think people will be making a lot more money individually than they are now. Wow. Because when you think about the yield of a company, the yield of people going up, their productivity going up, the yield of a company going up, companies should be making more money. Where do those dollars fall? Are they going go to the bottom line or back to shareholders? I actually think that we've seen nothing yet on the war for top talent. I think what's about to come is a whole other level Wow. Which is gonna benefit individual workers in a in a tremendous way. I'd also say the shape of companies, and this is sort of a odd point, so stay with me, is gonna change where when you think about like an org chart, it's basically like a triangle. I think it's possible we see different shapes for organizational hierarchy that are a little bit more circular in nature. If anyone... You can picture the pizza pie or like... I I like to think of a trivial pursuit, the piece with all the little ones that kinda slot in that you can, like, move around and reshape an organization that way that sort of moves outwards from the center. [00:30:09] S2: First of all, those are two really good hot takes that I've not heard from you yet. What else do you guys see that, you know, that... Like, what these organizations will evolve into?
00:30:19 · Max Shaw
[00:30:19] S3: On the compensation point and also the previous point I was making around personalization is I think every role and individual will get treated differently and in a much more personalized way. And and that'll factor into compensation. I think people will get paid more. I also think there's gonna be more dispersion. I don't think just because you're a software engineer level six, that means you're this specific thing. I think it's gonna be much more about your impact on the company, and that will dictate what responsibility you have, and it's not gonna be siloed. Hey, you're an engineer, you can only do engineering stuff. Everyone's gonna have kind of a unique role with an almost unique pay structure. And so I think a lot of it right now is based on kind of bands and industry standards because there's nothing else that's better. If you're able to better understand the impact of individuals at organizations, it seems inevitable to me that you're gonna make a lot of those decisions in a lot more of a personalized way. I like sports, and so the sports analogy is kind of obvious here where people... It's it's it's increasingly easy to understand people's impact on sports teams. And so they get paid drastically different amounts of money. And I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing for society, but I think it's gonna happen. And I think for people who have really have an outsized impact on their organization, you're gonna see some pretty crazy numbers out there. The other thing I would look at is... Obviously, I've talked a lot about engineering because that's where a lot of my background is. I think engineers have kind of already gone through this. They're probably, like, one to three years ahead of the rest of a lot of other white collar work in terms of this transition. Over the last two years, the way that engineering works has changed dramatically. It looks nothing like it did even twelve months ago. You're constantly seeing about how many lines of code were written by a person and blah blah blah. At the same time, I... The latest statistics I've seen is that engineering hiring is going up, not down. And it's a pretty simple reason to... Pretty simple explanation is that the value of each individual engineer is actually a lot higher. Right? If you can get a lot more done, why are you hiring less of them?
00:32:23 · Max Shaw
If they're a lot more productive, wouldn't you hire more engineers? I think radiology is another one that people often point to as a data point. AI is great at radiology, and there's more radiologists today than ever because a lot more people are getting... Are are leveraging radiologists. And so I don't think... And Brian is kind of alluding to this. I don't think it's simple black or white, whether it's the size of the company or kind of automating people out of work. I think the part that I'm confident in is that it's gonna change, and it's gonna look really different. And I think over the next five years, I'd say five years, if you look back, the same thing that's kind of happened to engineering is gonna happen to a lot of the different roles. And then the thing we're focused on is it's gonna happen to the way that companies orchestrate and develop their talent. And I think it's gonna look extremely different, but I don't think it... I would... I I don't think it's all going to single person companies, and I don't think it's a bunch of robots telling people what to do.
00:33:20 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:33:20] S2: I'm having a bit of a moment where I'm like, every every real CEO building right now should be listening to this, thinking about how do you get ahead of where the world is going. And I wanna recap a few things that I find really interesting. One, I I like this pushback, Brian, that it is not clear that we will have fewer people. What is clear is that they will be significantly more efficient and probably solving more complicated problems, which actually, you know, let's go back to the the chain guard analogy of you get rid of the factory worker because they become the factory manager. And actually, in that analogy, that factory manager now is managing a lot more complexity and actually doing a lot more real thinking work because a lot of the rote stuff you can actually get offloaded. And so you actually need better management support in that future Mhmm. Because you're like, are we thinking about inputs properly? Do we have the right dashboards for how to think about maybe the complexity of this new problem and ideas? He had this sentence that he was like, ideas are the bottleneck. And so people will be ideating and strategizing a lot more, and that I saw sort of the future gets rid of linear thinkers, and it thinks about nonlinear thinkers, which I think all three of us on this are are nonlinear thinkers. We're very strategic. And in which case, you actually need more support. So... And and then I also really like what you're saying, which is like, I don't know. Organizations may have more people. They're just doing more.