SE3EP3Miniseries: Startup Mind, Corporate Grind – Episode 3: The Talent Drain

Welcome to Startup Corporate Grind, the latest miniseries from Empires of Innovation with Ozan Stonemes. We'll explore the fundamental disconnect between the industrial era corporation and the modern entrepreneurial workforce. This series confronts the uncomfortable truth that the old corporate structure wasn't built for this generation and this generation wasn't built for it. We'll dissect why shiny employer branding fails to attract the builders and creators you need to, why corporate startup partnerships are a dangerous trap that can bankrupt a young company, and how the very definition of a job is being rewritten. Whether you're a corporate leader frustrated with your inability to attract talent, a founder navigating the treacherous waters of corporate partnerships, or a recent graduate facing a choice between creating value and becoming unnecessary, this series is for you. Join us as we challenge the obsolete rules of work and explore what it really takes to survive and thrive when a startup mindset collides with the corporate grind. Now, let's jump into today's episode. All right, welcome back.

Greetings from Tampere in Finland.

Amazing. Hope you're enjoying some good weather at least with the summer out.

Good weather, a lot of sunshine, which is good. That's a nice place for sure.

I, I, I think we're, we're not so far away from each other this time around, which is good.

Yeah. Yeah.

Great. Well, we are back to talk about the intricate relationship between startups and corporates. Yep. And we've discussed, you know, a lot about why startups often eye corporate partnerships with caution. We've talked about internal hurdles that slow down corporate engagement. And I want to zero in on sort of a critical challenge today for large organizations. And we've mentioned it, it's come up, but it's about attracting and retaining entrepreneurial talent. And the big question for a lot of corporates is why can't we attract entrepreneurs? Why can't we keep them? And, you know, we've, we've touched on it a few times, but I think that there we need to dive deeper. We need to talk more directly about the issue. And I think we need to also discuss some of the core reasons behind the talent drain. You know, fundamental differences in mindset, incentive structures that cause issues with hiring or firing as well. And I think we also need to talk about the expectations of the sort of new generation that we're living in, that we're living with, that we're working with and what that means for sort of professionals and maybe even a disconnect between that generation and the corporate structures that exist and will continue to exist. Yeah, so that's what we're going to look at today, I hope.

Perfect. I think disconnect is the right frame, frame of reference and the starting point. I agree.

Yeah, totally. So I think maybe to start us off right and drawing from your own experience, what are some of the fundamental reasons why entrepreneurial talent, specifically in the younger generation, my generation for instance, or those that are just entering the workforce, why might they view large corporations as less appealing compared to startups or building their own ventures?

So to me there are a few things that are important that has changed in the last maybe 20 years, one of which is the pace with which people are actually planning to get things done. So this is like the, there are a lot of books that are coming out recently, like the Dopamine Nation. Jonathan Hay has great books on this. And the younger generation of Today, let's say 25 year old people are born into a very engaging technology era with smartphones, social media and global connectivity. So they were born on YouTube, they were born on Facebook, they were born with tools, smartphones and everything else. So their brain, like I think there's research on this, is like scientifically and physically geared. Different. They have. So not for the good, not for the better, almost all the time. But they need to get stimulant occasionally. Not occasionally, but continuously. We need to get stimulants occasionally. I am, I'm coming from a generation that remembers boredom. So we used to get bored out of our heads. But I don't think boredom is in the language or like the tech tech lexicon of, of this generation. They can't stay bored. And that is a, that is probably the most difficult thing they need to understand at work. Work is not always engaging, work is not always rewarding. Work has rewarding moments that you go through and, but the time that you don't get rewarded for a very long time and then you get rewarded a little. That's not what I think. That's one of the reasons why there is a disconnect between how HR is playing out, how managers at my age, 40 plus, are having struggles. These young adults not only need validation and promotion and pep talk almost on a daily basis. So that's a problem, that's a psychological problem. But they also need to be rewarded to stay motivated. So their motivation is very much dependent on their reward. They can't find, most of them can't find motivation in the work itself. They need that reward. But it work, it doesn't happen that way or at work. In large companies there is a process. There is a timeline. You get evaluated every year. You get to talk to your HR leaders, maybe quarterly, which is very frequent, usually every six months you get a feedback loop. The feedback loops in the company to employee, which is hr, official HR to employee feedback loop is every six months, if not every year. The feedback loop between manager and employee is maybe every week, but usually every quarter, not every day. Managers in large companies are having trouble because now they start seeing the young employees require constant feedback, constant appreciation, constant move like that. I think is because very frankly, I think there are two different species. Like looking from a physical perspective. One has a different mind than the other. One has dopamine receptors that are changed. I don't want to say like damaged, but I feel that way. But that's too much of a wording. So I think there is a very different time scope element of how work happens in large enterprises. Established enterprises versus startups. In startups this can be rewarding, this can be exhilarating because everything's moving really fast. So every day something has to be sold. Every day there's a challenge, every day there is a crisis, every day there's a reward that's waiting, there is momentum. That fundamental difference between a startup's daily momentum and the large company's daily momentum I think is creating a huge gap in performance, huge gap in expectations, therefore performance. So when young people don't get motivated, exhilarated or get feedback, which is not how the large enterprises work and the large enterprise will not change. That's why it's a large enterprise. It was changing, it was starting. It's very difficult for the young people to just stay focused and, and get pleasure from the work itself, the day to day grind of the work itself. And that is creating a big shift in how HR is trying to mitigate this expectations gap. And I think most hrs are not yet geared towards this expectations gap because they are the ones who need to change how they give feedback, how frequent they measure, how frequent they talk upon all the things they need to be doing, which they had been doing structurally on a very periodical basis. They need to do things faster now. And that's what they're not also geared towards because they're part of the large organization. They're not part of. They need to manage the expectations of the young employees. But there are lots of more employees or lots of more structures they need to be managing. So they will not have the time or the energy or the investment to spend more time with this young employees. Because I've seen this firsthand recently I was delivering the week long bootcamp to new recruits of a very large enterprise. And my measure of success, because I'm into this work and I think about this a lot, was how many times do the quote unquote, kids, young adults, 20 to 20 to 25, reached out to their phones while I'm doing my lectures. So that was my measure of success and I wanted to keep it like one per hour. So I was not expecting them to not do anything for an hour, not reach out to their phones for an hour. But if when I start seeing more people reaching out to their phones or more people more frequently reaching out to their phones, I would understand, okay, it's time for a break or it's time for me to kind of take a mental note and see what did not go well because their physical ability to sit through things that are not rewarding is very diminished. That's a challenge.

Definitely. I, I, even as somebody in that, well, maybe a little beyond that age range.

Yeah, you're a little beyond that.

But I think I still have some of the after effects of, of whatever, you know, we've experienced with social media revolution and Internet revolution, everything like that. I think, I mean, it still makes its way into older generations. Of course we see the Facebook parents who, you know, are addicted to, to stuff like that.

Huge.

But I think, you know, this is a, this is a big problem, right when we're looking at corporates and we're looking at the future of, you know, decades long corporations who want to continue, you know, going into the next few decades and having successful businesses. But what is sort of the solution when the younger generation's expectations are for this fast paced, feedback driven, you know, faster promotions, more responsibilities with like sort of this adrenaline rush to their work. Like, what is the solution for a corporate who knows that it needs to bring those people in, but doesn't have the structures or the HR systems in place to facilitate that.

So I'll give two scenarios that is to me running in parallel at the moment, but eventually one of them will be the dominant scenario. One, if the companies are able to incentivize existing staff, existing middle managers, people would have 5, 10 years of total career, 2, 3 years of working in that company if they are incentivized. Well, and if the company invests, agrees, invests and manages AI agentification inside the company, that will be monitored. It can't be running on its own. It has to be monitored and owned by this middle manager. So these are people that have a career that have started doing something five to 10 years. They're not senior managers yet if they buy in, plus if the company invests, they can't do it by themselves. The scenario that is running is there will be no need for new hires at all if the process is owned, advocated and paid for by the corporate and mandated by the corporate to incentivize middle managers to get more paid off, more work that they're going to own. Not owning 510 people teams, but owning 510 agents doing some specific work that is their domain. If mid managers learn how to manage agents, there is absolutely no need to hire new people. Zero. There will be zero incentive. Zero. Problem solving there is, there's no need for a new hire at entry level. AI is far more superior, far more effective, far more efficient if customized, correctly, managed, correctly, owned correctly. So that's scenario number one. Scenario number two, young people, if they manage to prove their worth in the company by being ahead of the company in using AI agents or in using efficiency tools, let's not say only AI agents for the young people, if they learn the ability to learn faster than what the company requires them to do in their first year, in their second year, third year, if they come in well prepared for job descriptions that are already established, already structured for junior entry level positions, if they come guns blazing, if they hit the ground running, if they prove to the leadership of their HR or leadership team that they actually can get a lot of things done more effectively, more efficiently, saving company money, then they will be justified to actually come into the scenario number one and become those middle managers much quicker than five, 10 years. However, we have a disconnect between both at the moment and the scenario three which is set to Spotibus is not working. People are expecting to be hired, but they expect everything from the company to teach them, to pay them, to promote them, to guide them, etc, etc, yet at the same time the company is expecting them to start functioning without too much hand holding, without that oh I need to be a manager at attitude problems kind of way. So scenario three is broken already. So it will evolve into either scenario one or scenario two. There is a huge advantage, incredible advantage ahead of young people who understand this. If you are 18 to 25, if you understand value creation, if you understand entrepreneurial mindset like taking charge, being autonomous, learning things, having a fast paced developer, fast paced learning, algorithm of feedback loop learning, feedback loop learning as a lean startup like test, build, learn and keep moving. If young adults who have time, who are given more resources than the previous generation by their parents, because our now These days parents are by default willing to support their kids for a longer period of time. For good or bad reasons, doesn't matter. But that's, that's the helicopter parenting. That's, that's the whole thing that's coming through, especially in most parts of the world. I don't know how effectively that is in the US but with all the financial crisis, I think there's a larger population of people under 30 that are living under their parents roof with no kids and no responsibility. Now married, no kids. I think there's a short version for this. Or there are more people who are single income, no kids, from double income, no kids, from dinks to single income, no kids to things. Now there's single, no kids. And that's a different shift in the American system as well. But apart from that, outside of the world is also. We never had this, oh you're 18 and you go out in our Airbnb or previous room to others. We never had this in this part of the world. But regardless, kids will be young adults will be more with their parents. They have more time, more safety nets if they figure this thing out. They have the time, they have the resources. These things are not super expensive and they don't have a very super expensive life under their parents roof. They will become great leaders in large companies. Neil touched upon a critical point which is incentivization. I think we can't say HR figured out how to incentivize entrepreneurial people. Already within the system they're struggling. That's why we see a lot of corporate innovation programs struggle with this corporate entrepreneurship program struggle because HR is geared towards measuring the same thing over and over and over again. Incentivizing the same thing over and over again with manager promotion cycles, with 5, 10 years of cycles. So that's this pace of HR which has not changed, which is a problem in entrepreneurship programs. And now they have to figure out this in AI agentification. If I'm a good employee, if I'm a mid manager, instead of asking for HR for two new hires, I should ask HR to give me two weeks and some resources to figure out how to build an AI agent loop and workflow, which is easy because I'm in a company, I'm in large, there are workflows everywhere. So there's, it's more structured. So the ability for a corporation to turn all that workflow into agentic workflow is very easy. Structurally that's what it's built for. But because it's not incentivized correctly Most managers, when they're struggling with a problem, oh, we need growth, I need two more people. So that's the traditional path because why would I take that onto myself to train an AI agent to learn how to do it, to measure it, to be responsible from it. If I'm not paid more, I rather ask for two more people that I'm not, I might be responsible for. I'm not going to pay for them, I'm not going to be adding more salary to my, that's not going to add anything to me. Maybe a little bit of a bonus here and there, but that's the normal, that's what the corporate. So the HR has a tremendously important function. And I think this is the era where strategic HR that also includes AI agent management, one way or another, either incentivize or promotes or encourages, will lead most of the enterprises. But again, if you're following those two scenarios for young talents, they have so much to do by themselves because the scenario otherwise is like they don't, they are not needed in the workforce. Their four year of college education is at best signaling ability, but definitely not signaling competence or signaling value. So I would not want to be a recent graduate at the moment if I don't know what's going on around me, if I that that would scare me. They should. Or incentivize them or. This is the, this is a very interesting age where if young people are able to figure this out, how fast they can learn is like unprecedented. Like there is nothing. There's no era in the recent human history where so much information that was abundantly available but did not have. Like there's so many information around us behind locked doors that will take us too much time to open, too much time to move forward. But now those doors are unlocked and the tools are available so you can tap into not just information but knowledge and application. If you are able to figure this out, this connection. Oh, there's so much information. Has been so much information for the past 20, 30 years. Age of Internet every day, the amount of YouTube videos uploaded every second is enough for your lifetime. So that that's too much. But now because of that abundance, people were lazy as too much, I can't get it anyway. Amount of books, amount of content, amount of everything. But now you can actually have multiple tutors around you that you have taught, you have customized, you have given the task to learn and teach you. You just have to do the work. It will not come to you. It will not be like this, oh I need this. And Then I'm waiting for you. There is no waiting time. People who are not teaching themselves how to learn how to use AI to teach themselves are going to be unnecessary from the corporate perspective.

And if we're talking about the scenario in which somebody who is a recent graduate can learn enough that they come in as a middle manager of sorts or someone with five years of experience, how do we make sure that a corporate HR structure has the ability to recognize that in that person? Because I think we're. Yeah, I think it's great. You know, we're talking about folks who can educate themselves and get themselves to a point where they are valuable to an organization. But we also need to talk about the other side where the organization.

Yeah.

Actually knows what to recognize, how to recognize, how to incentivize appropriately.

True.

To really. Yeah. Match up with still the characteristic that that younger person needs, that constant, you know, promotional opportunity or the feedback or.

Whatever, that's, that's the HR revolution that needs to happen, which is not happening as far as I can see because. And that's the push people have towards entrepreneurial activities if HR does not retrain its logic of operation, modus operandi in the larger scheme of the corporate strategy, which have shifted towards talent retention, talent acquisition. So like imagine employer branding. Simon Burrows, who I had the pleasure to kind of periodically engage with when I was building something 15 years ago. Employee branding is new. Like it's not a 30 year concept. And now we see a lot of places where they strive to be the best employee of the, the, of the region or the company or the sector, best place to work for. So those are new, those are not like 50 year old things. That transformation towards promoting the company as a product, promoting the company culture, promoting the company's perspective, future operations and future growth as a hook, much like they're promoting their products, they have lots of hooks, etc. Is new. And hrs have had that transformation very slowly, unfortunately, so very painfully because we build tools to help companies to do that faster, efficiently, more productively. But it struggled like we were very ahead of our time. It did not work for. That's why I left and did something else. But now those companies are understanding, oh, we need to have an employer brand. Okay, perfect, good job. But now we need to have an AI brand. Now you need to have a young people brand. Now you need to actually go back to that same route of changing your perspective on, oh, I manage people, I manage payroll. Previously HR was only focused on managing payroll, managing taxes, Social Security incentives, putting posters and Going to universities for presentations. That still exists, unfortunately. But now that workload that's workflowable needs to get fully workflowable, like and through AIs and through very efficient tools. And once that workload is offloaded, that mundane work is offloaded. Now HR has to go through this understanding of how can I incentivize people? And the ability that they need to develop is not so different than the ability that the education system needs to develop, which had not been happening, which is personalized education. We're talking about personalized education for years. We're talking about flipped classrooms for years. Not many education institutions have created a structure. You can measure the development of every single student and build learning systems, learning tools and curriculums specifically to each student. Today, technically it's very possible. Like it's not like rocket science, it's not like science fiction anymore. You can have 20 kids in one classroom and all of them can be having different paths of learning to learn a single topic. And all of them needs to have can have their own AI tutor managed by one teacher in that classroom. Because education has a workflow. Education has like a first foot, second foot, third. It's structured what needs to be learned, the steps to get that learned, the measurement tools, those are available for hundreds of years now. And now some education institutions are actually going their way. University education systems, K12 education systems, are embedding these technologies, partially thanks to Covid, unfortunately, because they had to figure out how to invest in new technology, how to help this digital, digitalized version of delivery. And now through AI, there are so many things that are coming. Some are struggling to figure out what to do with ChatGPT or AI agents. Some are banning the use of AI. Some are now incorporating AI learning tools. Because now education needs to be has the ability to become personalized. Same thing will happen now. Corporates have the ability to incentivize personally everything in the corporate life. In every action under the corporate domain. Going after a certain topic, having a certain product, selling a certain it is measurable. Now, therefore it is very easy. Technically will take time, but like it's possible. It's not market science, not science fiction for the company to see overall who is contributing to the goals of the company and therefore design an incentive system to match the effectiveness and the contribution of each people. This may sound very dystopic, this may sound very crazy in a way that people's incentives be aligned with their performance. But that's the holy grail of human resources. Now human resources have to do the work much like education institutions that have to do the work to install the right technology set that does not take away people's individuality and circumstantial difficulties into action and keep moving towards incentivizing personally. Instead of we hired you at this year after two years we're going to evaluate XYZ people feedback 360s we're going to promote two people. Why it's lazy work now. And if companies understand that they have to be on top of their ability to personalize growth paths to individuals much like education system can individually design growth paths for their students, corporates can do that for their employees. And if they do that then they'll have better employees or better or worse doesn't really. It's not the right word. They will have more data driven employee engagement and more data driven engagement per results. And this is also kind of ties to part of the change that happened during the pandemic which is a lot of people are now working remotely, a lot of people are now working in two, three jobs. This gig economy thing is the tool to incentivize people for the amount of work they do. So it's not impossible to employ tools that we'd use in measuring impact and efficiency of gig workers. People that are not full time. I don't want to kind of not all gig workers but like white collar brain powered workers mostly because blue collar workers are or green color workers are already working per incentivized, per delivery per things they do. So all of a sudden this whole system of being paid for the things you do on a very regular basis and not paid for the things you don't do is creating efficiency. So there's a lot, there's a big parenthesis in Social Security problems, in lifelong empowerment and lifelong employee problems, incentivization problems, health care problems. So apart from all those social dynamites that needs to be sold the safety net if something happens to you, what happens if you're a gig worker? If you're working part time, then if you don't work you don't get paid. So how are you going to sustain yourself? How are you going to be so that's another societal problem in different countries have different solutions for that. But eventually that gig worker or part time worker or measured worker structures are coming into the corporates. Some corporates are now telling people oh you can work for another company, you can have your own company, you can be selling stuff on Instagram, that's perfectly fine. Some companies are very old school about that. You need to go to hr. You need to get a permission. But those companies will not be able to make that shift. And people who actually have other things they do in their life that make the money will not prefer to work for those large super companies. Because at the end I have something going on. Why would I give that up for you Where I can do that automatically almost and I can do this work automatically almost and why are you paying me for five days? That's stupid. Tying that to the conversation of the four day work week. It is very possible and it's proven to increase efficiency in wherever it was tested. So this whole idea of you need to work from nine to six, five days back to back nine to five for six days and then have a vacation so that you can consume. Which is the whole reason why we have this work weekend is because Ford said I need people to have fun and buy my car so they can. There's. There will be a reason for me to create more cars. So that came as a result of the most industrial revolution pioneers inside that I need people how to have free time to consume. Thinking about that is crazy. It's nuts. Like we're still doing that. Where the hell is like the Ford black production line that does not exist anymore and now we're in the brain power. We don't need to be at a point at 9 to 5 and young people know that and they by far they understand it, they want to take advantage of it. But the HR and the corporate structures is not allowing them to do it. Pandemic plus AI has forced that system to crack open and now we will see what will happen going forward. Because after the pandemic everybody said well I don't need to work from 9 to 5. Sometimes I work too much, sometimes I don't work. And it's perfectly fine for the corporate. Corporate could not manage it. Corporate could not measure it. Corporate could not incentivize based on it. And a lot of people don't want to go back to work in the office life where they will be treated the same way they were treated pre pandemic. Not that they don't want to go to work to the office, but they don't want to be enforced to appear or pretend they're working from nine to five. Which is not the case. Is not true. But with all the tools available with AI coming in force like full force HR and corporate leadership has to really have a plan to change the enterprise to zero model with the ability to incorporate flexibility and a lot of different technologies to be embedded into the lifeline. Of the culture. That was a very long answer to a very nice question though.

No, I think that was comprehensive and, and I think it gives a lot of food for thought. And I'm kind of curious now considering that, you know, in a corporate, you may have this dynamic of people who have been there for ages, you know, and then new folks who are coming in with this fresh mindset about AI, about, you know, what the possibilities are with technology and having that entrepreneurial sort of atmosphere, spirit, what have you. Is there a tension that could exist between those two groups of people? And how does, how does that older crowd have a resistance to sort of the fast change that younger folks might bring in? And does that contribute to a challenging environment for everybody at the organization to really. Yeah, talk about employer branding, switch the culture change to a more fast forward thinking.

So again, it kind of goes back to the incentive discussions. Unfortunately for the older generation, let's say plus 45, like me, my background had more traditional work in companies like Deloitte. And now my friends who started working 25 years ago right after college are C level executives in most companies like CFOs, CEOs or CEOs in some case. And 25 years having an executive role, very hard working people, very dedicated, educated people. And now what I see as a trouble for them is it's changing so fast. It's not like back in, when we were studying. I remember very few times where I had to submit digital documentation, PowerPoint, etc. Most were not even presentations, but like written things. Like I sit and write on Word and I print it out, I submit the printout and that's how I graduated in my MBA years, which is maybe 15 years ago, that changed. There were online learning management systems. I, as a student, I would do things digitally, I would submit things digitally. And that's after I started working. So we were having a conversation a while ago with a friend and when was the first time a company gave me a smartphone to do my work? That is within this last 20 years, maybe 10, 15 years. So I had a smartphone that had email on it, which was BlackBerry that I actually have, was expected to be online and to deliver answers digitally. So the amount and first time I started working for Deloitte, we literally had still disks, like floppy disks that we carried from previous years of engagements. We had to have them. We had laptops that were able to read floppy disks. Like that's completely ridiculous at the moment. So most, most people who are in their 25s never seen a floppy disk. They'll never see a floppy disk, never seen a video cassette. They'll never like the things that changed fast. We thought it was fast, but now we're in a different level of fast. And I think all this conversation, all technology always changed. Accountants were complaining that there was this calculators that they, they were using. They didn't want them. Or go back to the sabotage moment where in the Netherlands people wearing wooden knuckle sabos crashed the machinery because they thought machinery will take their jobs. It did, but the people were wearing sabols learn how to operate the machines. And that's the whole conversation. People who are going to the lakes to cut ice, learn how to manufacture or maintain ice fridges. So again, this whole conversation of technology always changed. People always complain, but they found a way that is very time dependent. Now this age, there is no time to figure out what's going on, let alone adapt. So the people that are in older generations who are used to change like we have seen huge amounts of change from no Internet, two desktops to dial up Internet to laptops, to connectivity to smartphones, like it's not like this generation did not see anything changing in their work life. It did change constantly and we were able to adapt. But now the adoption rate we need to go after is just increased. This generation who is very used to adapting is struggling to adapt because of the pace. Everybody was trying to figure what this whole AI thing is like three years ago. There are some companies who are still trying to figure out what this is about after three years, which is a lifeline like it's like ages in this world of change, movement and action and learning should be attached and should be managed these days much faster than it was before. So there is a tension not just with the way young generation has been raised as we discussed a while ago about expectations, taking care, emotional maturity. I would agree they are not, most of them are not emotionally mature. They mature later than we were used to. We were forced by the environment that were around us has forced us to mature in terms of taking care of our own actions, understanding consequences, having ownership of our career. So that that may not exist 100% in the young generation. I agree. But it doesn't stop the moment of technology adoption, the need to adapt to technology faster. So that's the, that's the dilemma where people in my age and senior roles in companies, they need to manage this and I think they should empower HR above other divisions to lead that conversation. So I think we are coming to a place where CFOs will be less important than HR leaders, seniors or CXOs, experienced officers, HR leaders, corporate culture officers, whatever you want to call them. Because money has become more of a commodity even in this inflationary crisis environments. But I think culture, technology adoption, even for companies who don't necessarily use deep tech, needs to understand how to do things better. And I think HR is going to play a really critical role. So if there's any C level leader that had the time to spend up until this point, they should have periodical strategy meetings and empowerment meetings with their technology people plus their HR people. Because it's not a tech problem alone, it's a culture problem, it's an adoption problem. And if it's led by the corporate, hr, corporates, culture, us, the generation are older, will adapt, but we need handholding, we need the necessary tools plus the incentivization. Because we are coming to understand this. And I keep telling this to younger people that are 25, the current Social Security systems, globally, all around the world cannot sustain people to work until 70 or 80. You're not going to see an 80 year old working in a large corporation, even though that person might have 40 years ahead of them, 20 years ahead of them after retirement. So everything has shifted in that health spectrum as well. I will, I will retire officially in maybe six months. That does not make sense. I will keep on working for as long as I live. But people working in corporates, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm, I bought into that life already. But people working in corporates used to wait for retirement, but they would also wait to die 10 to 20 years after retirement. Like that's the expectation. Oh, you don't live as much as you lived working, so maybe you'll live 5, 10, 20 years. These days if you're retiring at 50, 60, your life expectancy has 40 more years ahead. So what are you going to do with that 40 years? How could you have saved and created in 40 years of work? Let's say you worked until 20, you, you studied until 20, you worked for 40 years and you have still 40 years. That one to one is impossible to match regardless of how much money you're making. That's a very difficult thing to finance. Very difficult thing to finance from a company or country, Social Security perspective, very difficult to finance from a financial perspective. So how can you expect to have a system that will sustain you for 40 years when you only work for 40 years? So that's not going to happen. What we can see are the people who are working for us will not be able to see. So things have to change. That's why I keep pushing. Everyone has to have an entrepreneurial edge to keep generating revenue, to keep creating value and then generating revenue until they move away from this life. And that there is no such thing as, oh, I'm retired and I don't produce, I don't create, I don't general. I just consume. I consume leisure time, I consume travel time, I consume X amount of time. We will still need to be in productive mode for a very long time and thankfully we'll see if we use it well. We have the tools, the AI, agentic AI, plus some of the tools that are available from the corporate side as well to help us keep on working, keep on generating. But I think that tension is not just a generational tension, but a general tension in the workforce composition and workforce expectancy and the realities of retirement and realities of work.

Normally, I, I would ask you another question, but I, I feel that that really closes out the whole conversation so beautifully.

We end on a depressing note. Ish.

No, no, I think, I think you left with a good message. Everybody has to have an entrepreneurial edge.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah. And I think whoever is listening, if you haven't gotten that already in this podcast series and, and this min, then, you know, you should listen again.

Good luck. Yeah.

But no, I think that was great. Thank you so much for those comments and all of that insight. I think it's also tricky for folks who are not in HR to also think about HR and think about how they can make it work for them. So a lot of these thoughts about entrepreneurship and having that attitude about it is, is useful for sure, 100%. Awesome.

Interesting times are coming indeed.

We're living with them day by day and we definitely have more to talk about. I think, you know, there's, there's more to talk about entrepreneurial DNA in a corporate. So we will continue the conversation. But I think this was a great way to talk about.

Thank you. Great questions.

Yep, thanks so much.

Good luck everyone. Talk in next episode.

Yes. All right, take care. We hope today's conversation has given you a stark look at the challenges and choices facing today's workforce and the companies that want to hire them. Don't forget to subscribe to Empires of Innovation for more unfiltered discussions. For more about ozan's work, visit www.mroz.c a n s o n m e z. Com. This is Startup Mind Corporate Grind signing off.