AIWA "The One Thing" #16: The Unit of Production Just Changed. Automate. Augment. Rewire. (From My RDSW Talk)

E-shaped is the new T-shaped. 10x + 10x = 200x, not 20x.

Last week, I delivered a talk at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week titled "The New Start-Up Playbook: Why 2-Person AI-Native Teams Are Outshipping Their Competition."

*Link to complete RDSW talk deck w/synthesis slides

It’s as relevant for a 2-person startup as it is for a small team within a big company, and everything in between.

Here is why.

What changed is not intelligence. It is the coordination tax.

Never has it been easier for T-shaped individuals to become E-shaped. Thanks to AI, everyone has access to the ultimate personal coach, tutor and thought partner.

Never has it been easier for small groups of people to 10x their impact and outcomes. Thanks to AI, handoffs disappear and workflow-specific, highly specialized AI agents enable individuals with high agency to create an army of digital labor to achieve more, faster.

Human in the loop. Human on the loop. AI agents that are never outside your circle of competence or taste.

What started as an engineering question has become an organizational one. The high-velocity engineering teams figured it out first.

Everyone else is catching up.

Look at Cursor. Rocketed to $1B in revenue with a relatively small team of “over 300 engineers.” Doubled revenue from $1B to $2B with a similar headcount.

The day before my talk, SpaceX and xAI struck a deal giving SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor for $60B later this year, or pay $10B for their work together.

The combined companies putting them on a credible trajectory to compete head-to-head with Anthropic and OpenAI.

The unit of production changed. The capital is following.

Within the AI era, what is your strategy?

Automate. Augment. Rewire.

When the coordination tax goes to zero, the leadership question gets sharper.

Automate the tasks that no longer need humans. Not the jobs. The tasks.

Augment the work that still does. AI as the engine. Your experience as the map. Let it rip.

Rewire the operating model when the first two prove out.

Most companies will stop at automate. Some will reach augment. The most AI-leveraged companies will rewire.

The forcing-function question:

“If we were to rebuild our company or department today, from scratch, what would it look like?”

Hands in the dirt.

Humans + Machines. Never Humans vs. Machines.