FounderMail 5th Edition: AI's Impact on The Future of Work and Talent
👋 Hey there! I’m Ilan. This is FounderMail by Unstacked Startups, your monthly dose of startup insights that helps founders hire top talent, raise capital, and stay informed. Flying cars, underwater cities? Not yet. But time travel for productivity. Yes! Let’s go!
First time? Let us introduce ourselves…
Unstacked Startups is building a community of tech founders, early employees, leaders, and VCs uncovering the 'secret sauce' to startup growth. We want to share the insights with you through real conversations on our podcast (subscribe on YouTube or Spotify) live events, and our newsletter FounderMail.
In This Edition:
Shower Thoughts: Where Are The Flying Cars?
What’s Got Our Attention
Unstacked Podcast: The Future of AI and Superpowers for the Brain
The MVP Play with Mo Al Adham, Co-Founder & CEO of Frec
Unstacked Perspectives: Navigating the AI Evolution: The Future of Talent & Teams
Shower Thoughts
Soak up insights from our network’s top investors, founders and tech influencers.
As kids, we were promised a future of flying cars, time travel, and underwater cities. While time travel remains elusive, AI has gifted us the precious commodity of time.
Well, it doesn't create more universal time; rather, it carves out personal time. Borrowed from the mundane tasks of data-entry or debugging, this time is a gift meant to augment our uniquely human skills that cannot be replicated.
Whether it’s:
Perfecting your investor pitch and accelerating your product roadmap
Amplifying productivity growth; enabling your engineering team to build at 10x
Automating your Go-to-Market strategy to empower your sales team for more client engagement and understanding customer needs
Thanks to AI you now have the time to maximize your potential to do your best work.
TL;DR: AI has created the greatest tool for humankind - the gift of time. We are elevated to work at higher levels, free of repetitive tasks.
What’s Got Our Attention
The latest startup news and research you can’t afford to miss.
Robotic Economy Resilience - Seattle Times
Are the solo-founder unicorns coming? - Yahoo.com
Women love gen-AI - Fast Company
Unstacked Startups Podcast Recap
Check out our favorite insights from a recent episode of the Unstacked Startups Podcast. Every episode, Unstacked host, Ilan Saks, chats with startup founders, early employees, leaders, and VCs to uncover the 'secret sauce' of startup growth.
DAN SIROKER
You may know him for his viral fundraising strategy that led to $350M raised and 170 offers, or for publicly sharing his own performance reviews on Twitter for transparency. Meet the CEO & Co-Founder of the Sam Altman-backed AI startup, Rewind AI - Dan Siroker.
Key Lessons
A belief in technology's potential to surpass limitations has been the driving force for Dan Siroker’s entrepreneurship journey. The tech entrepreneur and maker talks how technology can give talent super powers, and the skills that will matter in an AI future:
New vocations and opportunities will emerge that are even more exciting than current ones, as evidenced throughout history.
Focus on your true purpose, what can AI do better? Remember.
Willingness to adapt & open-mindedness to the idea of doing your job in new ways will be needed.
AI won’t change core performance levels, but it has started to reduce the impact of years of experience as being a good judge of capabilities.
“If today you are a programmer and you're listening to this, and you're not spending half of your time asking Copilot - or an AI system like that - questions of the code and asking it to help you… then you are far less productive than somebody who is.”
The MVP Play
Unlocking the playbooks of startup MVPs, one question at a time.
Checking into the game? For this edition, we chatted with Mo Al Adham Co-Founder and CEO at Frec!
MOTIVATION
Why are you building Frec and what is the driving force behind your willingness to endure the challenges of founding a startup?
We’re building Frec to give everyone access to the same tools used by the ultra wealthy to build long term wealth.
Advanced wealth creation strategies, such as direct indexing, are now ready for mass adoption due to technological advances in machine learning and financial tooling over the past decade.
I feel strongly about working on products that accelerate everyone’s path to financial well-being.
VENTURE
What advice do you have for founders to ensure a good fit with potential VC partners?
Make sure you see eye-to-eye with VC partners on the type of company you want to build together and the steps to get there. Align on:
Expectations for hiring speed.
What defines product market fit and when to turn on revenue.
Conditions for future fundraising and a potential sale.
PEOPLE
How do you identify truly bar-raising talent?
I look for the following:
Humility, low ego and intellectual curiosity.
Outstanding in their field and can add value in another domain.
Extreme domain interest and ability to put in heavy hours to will a startup into existence.
Ability to communicate openly, debate intelligently, and commit.
The PLAY
Startup teams have never had as much potential as they do in the era of AI.
Here are three simple strategies to embrace it:
HIRE FOR VERSATILITY - Prioritize candidates that have a hunger for new knowledge and aren’t afraid to enter unknown domains.
BUILD A CULTURE OF AI BRAVERY - Don’t be afraid. Make it clear that AI is an ally that will be welcomed.
EMBRACE AI AS A GROWTH CATALYST - Adopt and integrate new tech that enables your team to acquire diverse and new skills rapidly.
Enact these and you may just evolve your specialists into multidisciplinary innovators or best in class for their domain. Be tactical with AI implementation and you will experience a new standard of growth.
Unstacked Perspectives
Unstacked host, Ilan Saks, on a mission to basically give everyone a Harvard MBA, one lesson at a time.
If you’re old enough, you might remember Steve Jobs getting up on the Apple stage in 2007 to introduce the first true smartphone, the iPhone. Few moments in history have been as impactful on the way we work (and live).
While technology continues to advance exponentially, there are some key technologies that have been a catalyst for major changes in the world of work and talent.
The introduction of publicly available, open source Artificial Intelligence is already proving to be in that class… if not leading it.
Founders face a pressing question: how will AI reshape the workforce, redefine roles, and dictate the future's in-demand skills?
Unstacked Startups host, Ilan Saks, recently sat down with CTO and AI Advisor, Arnold Liwanag, on the Unstacked Startups podcast. Together they got into the heart of this transformation, exploring the synergies between human ingenuity and AI's capabilities, setting the stage for dialogue on harnessing AI's potential responsibly and creatively.
Watch the full episode here, or jump straight to the key insights for founders in this month’s blog: Navigating the AI Evolution: The Future of Work & Talent.
How We Can Help You Grow Your Startup
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