This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "How To Exponentially Grow Your Business With AI" (uploaded April 1, 2026). The excerpt is a single-speaker talk/monologue giving business and hiring advice in the context of recent mass layoffs and AI adoption. The speaker warns companies overhired during the pandemic, describes rising hiring standards, and recommends making hires AI-native (examples: a "Beat Claude" application challenge, quarterly hackathons, mandatory office hours). The speaker also recommends tools and progression paths (ChatGPT → Claude → Claude CoPilot/Skills → Claude Code, and agentic tools like Manus or Perplexity Computer) and encourages proactive upskilling. The content appears aimed at business owners, marketers, and job applicants.
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So this is actually insane. If you look at the stats over here, you have Block who cut 40% of their staff. You have Amazon cut 16,000 or so. And I have CEOs messaging me every single week without fail. They are looking to cut at least 20% or they're not hiring. Somebody messaged me recently, they're like 20%. They wanted to cut 40%, but then their COO wouldn't let them. And you look at Harry Stebbings from 20VC, he was talking about this on his podcast. It's at least 20% across the board. So I'm seeing this everywhere and you have 0% of companies, there's nobody I know that's saying they won't cut, okay? So the question is, what do you do about this? First things first, you have to understand that a lot of these companies, they are looking to cut because they overhired during the pandemic years, okay? So they overhired, that's number one. So everyone has overhired, they're using a lot of the AI. The AI is a very convenient excuse. That's the first thing to understand. Now that being said, Every single company, my company included, we look for people now that are very AI native, okay? So that means we have a Beat Claude challenge, for example. So if you go to singlegrain.com/apply, again, singlegrain.com/apply, you can see our Beat Claude challenge that requires anybody that's applying to join the company, they have to beat AI. So they can use AI all they want, but there's all these challenges that are not really easy. You have to be creative with how you are applying to the company. And in turn, we're being creative in terms of the challenges that we're putting in front of people. So the bar is rising for every single company. And for your company, you have to do the same as well, because if you don't have these AI-native people, it's the equivalent of people joining your company that don't know how to use the internet. Now, the second piece is we're not talking like— I'm not saying fire everybody on your team. I'm saying you have to try to bring people along with you for the ride, okay? So we have a hackathon that we do every quarter. Probably we're trying to do even more of these. For 2 to 3 days, we shut the company down. So no customer calls, no sales calls. We are focused on building things. Everyone's focused on building solutions. And our mandate is to get everyone proficient with Claude Code. Well, why Claude Code? Claude Code is very important because it is an agentic coder that allows non-technical people such as myself, such as most of you watching this, I think, to build anything that you want. If you can build anything that you want, you have now injected yourself with this superpower and you now see this new world. It is waking everyone up to seeing this new world. That's why the hackathons are so important. That's why we do mandatory office hours every week where people can come up with their questions. That's why we ask people every week, what have you automated, right? It's, there's a lot of pressure right now, but the way I see it is you have to either apply pressure or the market's gonna apply pressure to you. You decide. And I'd rather have more control in my hands. I'm sure you do too. Now you might be saying, oh my God, I only know how to use ChatGPT. That's okay. Go from ChatGPT, graduate to Claude, use Claude Cowork, use Claude Skills, then graduate to Claude Code. Try to use general agents such as Manus, try to use general agents such as Perplexity Computer, then you can graduate to the class. So if you enjoy this, comment newsletter for more on AI, business, and marketing.
