Why "Good Enough" Teams Won't Survive AI

You know what Satya Nadella said? We've talked about this, but I want to reinforce this. The CEO of Microsoft, he said that, look, the future designers that you're going to have or developers, they're really going to be a product manager, a designer, and a developer all in one, right? Because, Neil, like you and I, even 8 weeks ago, like I really didn't have developer or designer superpowers. I kind of do now. And so like, but you and I both have— I would say we have taste because we're all— we're always learning, we're talking to people, things like that. So that's As long as you're constantly curious, you will learn these things, no doubt. I think that's what's missing with people. It's that curiosity and resilience. And this brings me to the article. And then I want to end this one with maybe a little bit of a— we had a crypto debate yesterday at dinner, and then we can talk about that too, because I think it's interesting to share our philosophies, which is not financial advice, but more so how to think about these things. Because Neal and I, even we have different thoughts on how these things are. So let me go through the article first. Let me make sure I hit the right screen here.

Well, and as Eric's pulling it up, I think he's spot on. I do believe AI is going to impact marketing. I actually believe AI is going to impact development and product and design more than even marketing. That's just my personal opinion. And a great example of this is I'll use tools like Lovable to mock stuff up for changes I want to my app really quickly, and I just go send it to my team, not for them to use that, but for me to explain the changes I want. And I remember maybe 3, 4 months ago, Eric was just like, dude, how do you make your changes? And I would tell him that, yeah, I just get on the phone with my team and I'll go into telling them to make changes. Lovable's improved a lot over the last year. It's now at a point because my team's in so many different time zones and I have people working while I'm sleeping that instead of waiting to get on the phone with them, I'll spend 20, 30 minutes cranking stuff out and sending it to them. I'm like, create something like this, run an A/B test. And they know to not just use my version, but to modify it, make it better. The copy that I set in there is typically the copy that I want used, so they use my copy, but it just makes life easier. And that's the power of AI, right? Even in a marketer, I'm using it to adjust my flows and improve my conversion rates. At a much faster efficiency rate. Cool.

All right.

All right. So this article—

can you see my screen? You can see my screen, right?

Yeah. You've Been Kicked Out of the Arena title. You just don't know it yet.

Yep. So this is— this article is from Claire Vo. She's a— I love the stuff that she puts out. Sometimes I listen to her podcast. So the title of this article is You've Been Kicked Out of the Arena. You Just Don't Know It Yet. So let me cover some of the key points here. Right. So If AI had— if AI adoption had 7 stages of grief, almost all of you would be in denial. No matter how many AI memos your CEO sends, the amount of Claude that's being coded, the chatbots and app and evals and data, I'm here to tell you, you're not competing. In fact, you probably can't anymore and you won't notice until it's too late. So the going concern is the walking dead, right? So she's like, I look around and I see a lot of businesses that would have 3 years ago been pretty enviable. $100 million plus in revenue, solid customer base, mature executives, and a good enough team. So on the surface, a few of them are trying to meet the moment, whether by choice or by force. It has worked its way into little parts of the business and the product. They have some internal power users. They're slapping on chatbots and MCPs to their product suite. They have a natural language interface for their product named after a girl or a gem or a spaceship. They start to say things internally like, we need to be Cursor for X or Claude Code for Y, or perhaps worse, we have a proprietary data moat that they'll all need. And in the meantime, the pot keeps boiling, right? So where she's going with this is like, look, your peers aren't your competition anymore. So the reason it's so easy to convince yourself and an entire company that you're totally in the game is you think your competition is who they've always been and will act the same way they always have. Because guess what? You, you're who you've always been and you'll act the same way you always have. You'll be in the same deals, have the same marketing tactics, you'll ship same equal proportions of new product and make noise about them in the same way. You call on and hire the same class of VPs, the engineers with the same YOE backgrounds. I don't know what that means. The same PMs with domain expertise. You'll listen to the same podcasts and forward the same tweets. You have the same ideas for how AI is going to transform your business and you'll pitch the same mini pivots to the board. So let me wrap this up here. So your competition, that's not your competition anymore. It's really the startups are doing everything you claim to be doing with AI, but without thinking about it or working too hard. They naturally reach for the right tools and have no processes that they need to circumvent to get access to them. While you are debating what percent of R&D you should be allocating to AI initiatives, They built the right product idea you have sitting on a slide, called on your customers, established their wedge, and you probably won't know until renewal time. You probably won't appreciate it until the best talent starts to leave, best talent starts to leave and work for them. You won't know until you're cooked. So this is the main point here. Everything that takes longer than a day, so everything greater than a day, NGMI. NGMI means what? Not gonna make it. Okay. And I've been talking to one of our mutual friends here at this event. Our little, our little retreat here. So she's like, look, I have a simple heuristic for identifying who has been kicked out of the arena, and it's this. And, uh, Neil, this is something we could debate on. They can't do anything the same day. It doesn't matter what it is, but I'll give you a list of things I've seen companies be unable to do in a day: fix bugs, launch landing pages, upgrade to a new model, get a PM on a call with a customer, get access to a new AI tool, turn around negotiations on executive comp. Before AI, this was a less useful heuristic because many of these took scarce expertise like engineering and therefore time. But now Now we have the clarifying light of AI, and if you can move fast and yet you don't, it's a problem. It's a you problem, babe. Okay, so let me, let me get the, the last part here. Let me see if there's anything else there. So, um, here's what she's calling out here. So she's like, look, I can't blame you for wanting to try. So if I were at one of these companies, this is what I would do. Get everyone upskilled immediately. Stop the presses. Show up in 2 weeks and show me how you've automated 80% of your job. If you've done this, congrats, you have a new exciting job. Number 2, get legal security and finance to stop being annoying about trying new tools, right? That's, that's a problem at bigger companies. Number 3, let your engineers loose on making your repo agent-friendly. 4, resistant executives are out the door. 5, resistant engineers are out the door faster. 6, more aggressive than comfortable M&A. You probably can't build what you want. You might be able to buy it. And then there's a lot more here, but we'll just leave it at that. Like, hire executives sparingly and carefully. So, Neal, what do you think about this?

I think it works for some things like the simplest example there. She says, if you can't do this in a day, it doesn't make sense. And one of them is turning around—

Landing pages.

Executive comp negotiation within a day. I disagree with that. Some things just in business, you do not want to turn around in a day. And example of this, and Eric is shaking his head agreeing, and we've both been through this. When someone asks you for a raise, you don't always want to get back right away. Sometimes you want to make them sweat and think because Eric and I have both been in this game long enough where there's some people who will want a raise every 2 to 3 months. And it's just like, you don't have the experience, the expertise, you don't deserve it. It doesn't make sense. I can hire better people than you for cheaper than what you're expecting for.

Dude, they don't have the double E-A-T. That's what they don't have.

That's right. So EEAT, we're joking around and you guys all know this, experience, expertise, authority, and trust, as Google likes calling it. But yeah, sometimes you just want to make people sweat. I agree though. I think things can move a lot faster. I don't think 80% of everyone's job in an organization can be replaced by AI. I think in some roles, 100% can be replaced.

Yeah.

I think in some roles it's only going to be 10%, 15%, 20%. It really varies on what you're doing. And the way I see the world moving, at least in the marketing realm, I can't speak for every single division out there. There's certain things like if someone was doing keyword research manually, it's like, okay, you don't need to do keyword research manually. We can have AI just go through this and do it for you. You should still review it and you should just double-check. And over time, AI will be good enough where you don't need to actually review the keyword research. So that'll just save you time. Like there's basic mundane, boring stuff that should and could be done in an automatic way. And it's going to be at least in marketing. And here's the kicker. A lot of people have been asking me over the last 3 months, how do we go and automate all this stuff in our organization when it comes to marketing? You know what I tell them, Eric? You don't need to. And I'm like, there's enough marketing software tools out there that are already building and doing all of this stuff. And I'm like, instead of you trying to figure all this out, just use one of these tech stacks that eventually you'll be able to spend $100 a month per seat and they'll just do it all for you.

Quick break. Look, I know what you're thinking. Another AI content tool. Great. More garbage content on the internet. And I thought the same thing. That's why we spent years building ClickFlow differently. Here's actual feedback from a user. It's sophisticated, grounded in real language, authoritative, but not academic. You've hit the sweet spot. That's not AI slop. That's content that you would actually publish. ClickFlow also helps with things such as internal linking, building FAQs, and reporting on the content performance. If you're skeptical, you can just go to clickflow.com and try it for free for 14 days. And if it sucks, just cancel. But I don't think you will. Back to the show. So my take on this one is I think there's obviously nuance to Neil's point. I do think in a lot of situations, if you're working with people on your team where it's like, oh, it's going to take me a week to do a landing page mockup, I'm like, you're basically— I'm sorry, you're probably out. If you tell me, like, if I see you responding slowly or it's going to take you forever to— for example, like if let's say if, you know, you're leading sales or something like that, if a big lead comes in and you haven't— if you're the sales leader and you haven't figured out how to automate that piece yet where it's like send them a text message immediately, that's more personalized. Or even make a phone call quickly. Like, maybe not a phone call immediately yet because it's not that good yet. But my point is you should be able to figure out a lot of these things to make your life easier. Like, yeah, those things should take less than a day, right? When you're telling me like it's still old timelines, you're still working the same way. Like, don't— like, I'm telling you guys, those of you listening, like, if you're a founder, you can probably see this already. But if you're working for someone and if maybe you're working with people on the team, like, You either have to confront them or do something about it because these people are unfortunately holding the company back.

Yeah, and the landing page example Eric gave is perfect because if someone— if I want a landing page, either A, I'm going to do it myself, at least tell people what I want created and show them inspiration, and B, if someone's in charge of it, if they took a week, it's not going to fly. Even if they took a day, I would kind of be irritated. I want something, especially if they have time, Turned around within an hour, like straight up an hour, 2 hours max, like, and I want it deployed within the same day, maybe the next day at the latest, right? But if you're taking a week to deploy something, I'm just already pissed and irritated and I'm like, this isn't going to work out for me.

Or Neil, like, I don't need like a full budget projection, but if I wanted a data dump of finances and some analysis around it, that should be a lot faster now. Um, and so, you know, it's interesting. Syed told me this, Syed's like, dude, And you've kind of said this yourself. Like, he's like, Siyed's like, Eric, you believe in people too much. He's like, you believe in people too much because you like giving them chances. You like to let them learn, right? But you like— but not everybody's like us at the end of the day, right? But I'm like, I can't. Like, I just, I just want to, like, strangle people to, like, wake them up and say, hey, like, this is available now. Like, I want to help people, but some people just don't want to help themselves, right? And that's unfortunate. Because like we truly do want the best for people. That's all I have to say.

So we're out of time, but before we end, I want to clarify what Eric just said. Eric and I— and it came out the wrong way, and I'm not trying to talk down to Eric or anything like that. Eric and I both believe in people. We do see the value of humans, and we think people are extremely valuable. What he's actually saying is from his experience, there's some people in an organization that he's trying to help and educate and bring forward and teach them all this new stuff, but they don't want to adapt and they don't want to learn and they're stuck in their ways.

Yep.

And what he's getting at is, and most businesses believe this, you got to be careful who you hire. As we both stated earlier on, on this podcast, we believe talent is the most important element AKA people, but you got to pick the right people and be careful and make sure either A, they know everything that you're looking to, and B, if they don't know everything, that's okay. They have to be open culturally to shifting, learning, and adapting instead of being closed-minded, because when someone's closed-minded, it's very hard for them to adapt.

Yeah, and the final thing I'll close on this one is inertia is a very real thing, right? You know, people are You know, when it comes to physics, for example, like things tend to go back to their resting state. Um, but you know, if you're more entrepreneurial, which most people aren't, right? But you, you're tending— you want to increase the temperature all the time and you, you cannot— like, I know for Neil, I know for myself, like we can't— I'd be very unsettled if I was in a resting state all the time, right? I need to keep— um, we want to keep pushing. And so all that to say is like, yes, you know, very much focus on talent, focus on, on getting good at hiring talent. But even if you get really good at it, you're maybe only right Maybe 50% of the time if you're if you're good, right? Maybe a little higher than that if you're like world class at it. But just keep that in mind. So that's all we have for today. We can leave the crypto debate for another time, and we will see you.

We'll see you next week.

Goodbye.