Stop Boarding Up the Windows. The Tsunami Is Coming.

There’s a popular narrative about AI and jobs right now. It goes something like this: AI is coming for your job. Companies are laying people off. The robots are winning.

It’s not wrong, exactly. But it’s dangerously incomplete — like watching a hurricane through your living room window and thinking the problem is the wind.

When a hurricane hits, the first thing you notice is the wind. Trees bending, debris flying, power lines snapping. It’s dramatic and visible and it’s what every camera crew points at. Then comes the rain — relentless, overwhelming, the kind that makes you question every decision that led you to this moment. But neither of those is what kills you. What kills you is the storm surge — the wall of water that arrives quietly, rises fast, and reshapes the coastline permanently.

Right now, most companies are boarding up windows and buying umbrellas. They should be rebuilding the foundations of their house, constructing intelligent levees, and figuring out how to capture the power of the surge itself.

There are three forces hitting the corporate world right now. Everyone is focused on the wind. The smart ones are dealing with the rain. Almost nobody is preparing for the surge.

The Wind

Last week, Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 people from Block — roughly 40% of the company. The stock jumped 24%. Dorsey framed it as an AI story, telling analysts that “intelligence tools paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

Maybe. But here’s the thing: Block nearly tripled its headcount between 2019 and 2023. It kept hiring for a full year after its peers — Shopify, Coinbase — stopped. An Oxford Economics report released in January found that many layoffs CEOs described as “AI-related” were actually the correction of past overhiring.

This isn’t new. Dorsey founded Twitter, a company that famously grew to nearly 8,000 employees before Elon Musk walked in, fired 70% of them, and the product never skipped a beat. Musk took an enormous public beating for doing it. Trump is taking a similar beating for attempting the same thing at the federal government level. Dorsey? He got a 24% stock pop and a round of applause from Wall Street.

AI makes a very convenient cover story. When you’ve spent years building organizational bloat — adding layers of management, spinning up committees, hiring people to manage other people who manage other people — you eventually need a reckoning. AI gives you the narrative to do it without admitting you let things get out of hand. It’s the corporate equivalent of blaming traffic when you’re late because you slept through your alarm.

The wind is real. It’s loud. It gets all the attention. But it’s largely a correction, not a revolution. Don’t mistake it for the real threat.

The Rain

The second force is more forward-looking, and it’s where most of the smart money is focused: the desperate scramble to become AI-native before your competitors do. It’s relentless, it’s everywhere, and it just won’t stop.

Today’s Deep View newsletter reports that developer job postings are up 11% year-over-year. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, put it well: when you lower the cost of something that was previously supply-constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Vibe coding is lowering the barrier to building software, which is creating more software, which is creating more demand for people who actually know what they’re doing.

Companies are pouring money into AI talent. They’re willing to pay premiums for AI-skilled employees. LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise report shows surging demand for AI literacy and prompt engineering across occupations. Everyone needs more AI-native coders because product cycles just got a hell of a lot shorter — and if you wait around, you’re going to be eclipsed. The rain doesn’t let up. You need more people, better people, different people. It’s annoying. You just want it to stop for a minute so you can catch your breath.

And yet — Goldman Sachs’ chief economist says AI contributed “basically zero” to U.S. GDP in 2025. OpenAI’s own COO admits that AI hasn’t actually penetrated enterprise business processes at scale. So we have massive investment, rising demand for talent, and… basically no results yet.

This is the rain. It’s the most tangible force, the one companies are working hardest to manage. Hiring aggressively is smart. But hiring alone isn’t the answer. How you organize those people — and what you let them do — matters far more than headcount.

The Storm Surge

This is the force that keeps me up at night. Not because it’s scary, but because it’s so obviously coming and so few companies are building the barriers they need.

The ability to code and ship product has accelerated so dramatically that the best people in your engineering and product organizations are facing an unprecedented choice: stay and fight the bureaucracy, or walk out the door and solve the problems themselves, on their own terms, no permission necessary.

A few years ago, I ran a data business. We solved a genuinely hard problem using machine learning, a sprawling web of enormous Google spreadsheets, and an update process that took hours per day to run. It worked, but it was held together with duct tape and determination. I recently joined the board of a company in the same space. Five years later, they have 20 people working on what my team of three did back then — and they still haven’t fully cracked it.

With today’s AI tools, a small, focused team could likely solve this problem continuously and deploy it in weeks. Three people. Maybe five. Yet no one in the industry has done it, despite plenty of companies trying.

Why?

Clayton Christensen had the answer before AI even existed. He called it The Innovator’s Dilemma. Successful companies get so invested in serving their existing customers, optimizing their existing processes, and protecting their existing revenue that they can’t bring themselves to cannibalize their own business — even when the disruption is staring them in the face. In The Innovator’s Solution, he went further: the answer isn’t just recognizing the threat, it’s organizing to respond to it.

AI has turned the Innovator’s Dilemma into the Innovator’s Emergency. The timeline for disruption that used to take a decade now takes a year. Maybe less. The storm surge doesn’t announce itself. It rises fast, and by the time you notice the water at your ankles, it’s too late to build the levee.

Because if you don’t let your best people rebuild your business from the inside, someone sitting in their apartment with an AI agent and a cup of coffee is going to do it for them.

The Org Chart Is the Bottleneck

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that most corporate leaders haven’t internalized yet: coding and data are no longer the bottlenecks. We’ve spent 30 years treating engineering capacity as the scarce resource, building entire organizational structures around rationing it — CTOs at the top, layers of VPs, PM’s below them, engineers arrayed in squads and pods and whatever other Agile-flavored configuration is trendy this quarter.

That model made sense when code was expensive and slow. It doesn’t make sense anymore.

If you have 200 engineers and 10 PM’s all rolling up into a CPO, you are almost certainly better off with 25 AI-native builders — people who combine product intuition, domain expertise, and the ability to ship — each with the authority to rebuild their piece of the business from the ground up. Not managed in the traditional sense. Empowered.

This requires a fundamentally different kind of management. Less command-and-control. Less process. Less asking for permission. More trust, more autonomy, more tolerance for the kind of creative destruction that makes middle managers nervous and shareholders rich.

Distribution Is the Moat

There’s a corollary to all of this that founders and executives need to hear: in a world where superior product can be built in weeks by a small team, distribution becomes the only durable advantage.

I’d rather have a company with 8 million downloads and a mediocre product than a dead startup with a technically brilliant one. Distribution wins. It always wins. Distribution plus superior engineering and relentless product cycles is an absolute killer combination. But distribution plus a bloated organization that can’t ship fast enough to take advantage of it? That’s a slow death, no matter how many users you have. And anything that doesn’t scale? Why bother?

So What Do You Actually Do Monday Morning?

Marc Andreessen said on Lenny’s Podcast recently that AI is a philosopher’s stone — a technology that transmutes the most common material in the world into the rarest resource. The question isn’t whether AI works. The question is whether you’re going to pick it up and use it, or just ask it questions like Google.

If I were running a company right now, here’s what I’d do.

First, I’d surround myself with the deepest domain experts I could find. Not generalists. Not people who need to be “brought up to speed on the industry.” People who understand the customers, the problems, the desires, the friction — people who dream about the product and wake up with ideas. That’s your core. That’s everything.

Then I’d reorganize around that expertise. Having a great CMO is a wonderful thing. But if they need six months to learn the space, I’d rather have someone who already lives and breathes the customer — and let the AI handle the CMO tasks. Content creation, social media, newsletters, campaign optimization — these are exactly the things AI does brilliantly, continuously, and at scale. The product knowledge, the customer intuition, the domain insight? That’s the part that can’t be automated. So build your team around it.

Take your best people — the Swiss Army knives, the ones who can think and build and ship — and give them massive autonomy. Not just permission to innovate. Permission to break things, with the understanding that they can put them back together better. Optimize everything through testing. Kill anything that doesn’t scale. Shrink your teams to the most functional core you can manage and then get out of their way.

The modern corporation that thrives in this era is built around a CEO with deep domain knowledge and a vision for the future, coupled with a small group of people willing to pick up the philosopher’s stone and use it. Not ask for permission to use it. Not form a committee to study it. Not run a six-month pilot to evaluate it. Use it.

The wind is already blowing. The rain is coming down hard. Most companies are responding accordingly — trimming headcount, hiring AI talent, buying better umbrellas. But the storm surge — the quiet, invisible force that will reshape the corporate landscape permanently — is just starting to rise.

AI is the tsunami. The layoffs, the hiring sprees, the frantic upskilling — those are just the water receding from the beach. If you’re standing there watching it happen and thinking the storm is passing, you’re in trouble.

The companies that survive will be the ones that move to higher ground — that rebuild their foundations, reorganize around their best people, and harness the force of the wave rather than bracing against it. And here’s the part nobody wants to hear: it’s steeper at the top, and there’s room for fewer people.

That’s not a threat. It’s a blueprint.