You’ve been told AI is coming for your job. The data says something more complicated than that.
Yes, jobs are disappearing. Yes, the layoffs are real. Yes, the way most companies are structured today won’t make sense in five years.
The doomers aren’t wrong about the change.
They’re wrong about the conclusion.
Every new technology in history came with the same prediction. This one will kill jobs. Close doors. Make most people obsolete.
Wrong every time.
ATMs were supposed to kill bank tellers. There are more tellers now than before ATMs existed.
Cloud replaced server management. Same prediction. More engineers than ever.
Notice what actually happened in each of those shifts. The work transformed completely. The old roles disappeared. Entire categories of jobs got commoditized overnight.
And the result was always the same:
More people working in the field. More opportunity. More wealth created.
The global software engineer pool went from 5 million in 2010 to 28.7 million today. Every single year coding got easier, more people built software.
AI is the next chapter of the same story. Just bigger.
And at Anthropic – the company whose CEO said three months ago coding is “going away first” – engineers are being paid more than almost anyone in tech history. $320K+ bonuses. For roles that didn’t exist five years ago.
The old jobs shrank. The new ones got more valuable.
They didn’t lose their jobs. They got 10x faster. And Anthropic needed more of them – not fewer.
Meta’s engineering headcount is up 19% since 2022. Google’s up 16%. Apple, 13%. The companies that went deepest on AI tools earliest are hiring more than before. Not less.
I’m seeing the same thing inside my portfolio. The founders deploying AI hardest aren’t shrinking their teams. They’re outgrowing the structures they had a year ago. Faster than they can hire for them.
My point is: When the cost of building drops, the number of things worth building explodes.
A startup that needed 10 engineers now needs 3. But 50 companies that couldn’t afford to build at all now can.
The denominator shrinks. The numerator explodes.
Most people are watching the tool get smarter and assuming the human becomes less valuable.
That’s never how it worked.
The tool getting smarter raises the floor for what’s possible – and blows the ceiling off what gets built.
The founders winning right now aren’t the ones figuring out how to replace people with AI.
They’re the ones figuring out what becomes possible when AI makes everything cheaper to build.
Completely different question. Completely different decisions.
Every generation gets a moment where the old rules stop working and the new ones aren’t written yet.
The people who win that moment aren’t the ones protecting what used to work.
They’re the ones who figure out what’s possible now.
This is that moment.
Don’t miss it.
-DM