The Quiet Builder Is Dead | Why Founders Must Own the Narrative to Win

If colleges become trade schools, I think they're doomed. I think there's a lot of things that happen at college. Education is one of them. Personal development, self-discovery, adulting. All of these things happen, I think, in a relatively safe place to explore these things. The jobs that come out the other end are, I think, an important part of the equation. If we get rid of college for some reason, I hope we replace it with something that feels similar, that allows people to go from being literally teenagers to adults.

It's the week of May 18th. Welcome to The Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast. Welcome to The Learning Corner by Precursor. I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will be talking through the articles and good reads that caught our team's attention over the past week. Our first piece this week is a blog post on LinkedIn by Vili Ilchev titled Narrative. Vili makes the case that the quiet builder playbook, the one where a great founding team compounds in the background and lets the product speak for itself, is no longer enough to win. His argument is that the sheer scale of growth venture funds today has changed the incentive structure. The biggest mistake a major fund can make is missing the market leader. So they're backing narratives as much as companies. The pace at which narratives now form and collapse means that if you're not actively shaping the story around your startup, someone else is shaping it for you. Billy closes with the point and challenge: founders need to be spending 20% or more of their time making their startup not just exciting, but inevitable. And speed remains non-negotiable throughout. The quiet builder identity has always been celebrated in early-stage venture historically. Do you think, Charles, that there's a version of that archetype that still works today?

I read this and like my immediate reaction was like, yes, this is right. And then I thought about it some more and I'm like, but maybe less right than I initially thought. I do think that we are in a world where attention is really scarce and getting people's attention is really hard. And so I think a certain amount of competition for attention and companies that can break through do have an advantage. I think as we've talked about before, sometimes breaking through and having substance are not always the same thing. I think the other thing is almost by definition, if there are companies that are succeeding without pursuing narrative, we probably don't know as much about them by design. We just haven't had as many examples of that lately. And I do think what Vili says is true, which is it's harder to do the like build and quiet compound thing because there are far more capital providers, you know, mid to late stage in venture who are looking for those companies and trying to discover them. But I see there's always been the Summits and the TAs who've been out looking for companies that were under the radar, but top performing. I think it's harder to hide as a startup now if you are one of those because of the amount of metadata we have about startups from tools like Spectre and Harmonic and others. It's just harder to hide if you're amassing talent, revenue, or other things. For me, it's harder to answer that question of can you become large and build? I'd say if you're in AI, it's pretty hard right now to do that. And I honestly think a lot of it is because of the talent piece. The talent is being so tightly tracked. If people begin to cluster around a company, people will want to figure out, well, why are all of those smart people? Maybe if you're in a category where there's less attention being paid, this is a strategy that's easier to execute.

Marina on our team yesterday made the great point of stealth is an archetype that kind of fits in this world a little bit. But to your point, the talent issue comes up of how easily is it for you to grab the top people? You can't really share that much information as to what you're building. I also think it's funny, founders who now build in stealth understand how to send signals out to the right people and create narrative. Putting your job history on LinkedIn as stealth immediately fires different things out and then posting on LinkedIn and tweeting constantly. There's always interest and the difficulty is actually how do I get in front of this person to hear more? It's just like the upside down world of venture.

I do think what you are seeing too is there are some companies that do such a good job on early capital raising that like the narrative becomes that they are the market. I think about Harvey in legal before Lagoora. If you said like, what's the legal AI company? People would say, well, it's, it's Harvey because that's the one I've heard of the most. That's the one that's most associated. With that trend, I can think of some other categories where there are like companies that seem to have captured people's association with that category. I think that's valuable. The thing when I read it, I thought about is in a world where customers are also confused about what company should I use to solve problem X, being the narrative leader, being the most well-known company in your category, being associated with successful other brands, whether those are investor brands or founder brands, I think does give people comfort that like in a world where all of these things maybe feel the same, this is the one I want to pick.

Yeah, it's like what's the easier discussion to kind of run internally is like, it's certainly the company that everyone's heard about versus this one. You found on a weekend when you were scrolling the internet. Really draw the line between creating narrative versus capturing one that already exists. For founders in our portfolio, how do you maybe advise them to figure out which position they're in, or do you do that at all?

I think I talk to a lot of founders who are just like, oh, I don't want to post on LinkedIn, I think it's cringe, I don't want to like do all of this other stuff. And I'm like, first of all, there are many things you do at work that you maybe don't like, that don't come natural. So in my opinion, that's like not a good excuse. I tell people like, if you don't do this, you're leaving the playing field open for somebody else in your category to do so. Someone told me yesterday, it's not always that the loudest companies are the best, but you certainly know who they are. And so I don't know, I think pre-product market fit, is there a danger in being super loud? I think so. But I really do think we're in an environment right now where people have so many questions. Where's this stuff going? What matters? That's like a narrative conversation. And if your startup's not part of it, you run the risk of, I think, being irrelevant.

Well, our next piece is from Oren Hoffman's Substack titled, If You Can't Get a Job Today, It's Your Fault. Oren opens up by pushing back hard on the narrative that the job market is soft, pointing to US unemployment sitting near a 50-year low, entry-level hiring projections revised sharply upward for the class of 2026, and companies like IBM tripling junior hiring outright. His argument is that the market didn't disappear, the definition of what qualified. The old system of college branding acted as a hiring signal that has largely broken down for anyone outside the top 20 schools because AI made knowledge access free. Grade inflation eliminated GPA as a differentiator, and admissions criteria stopped predicting much of anything useful. What replaces all of this, he argues, is did you build something? It could be a launched app, it could be a side project, it could be a small Substack with less than 50 readers. Really anything that moved from idea to working is now worth more to a hiring than a 3.9 GPA from a top 50 school. He closes by naming the rarest skill in the market right now as follow-through, doing what you said you're going to do every time. Charles, curious if this piece, after you read it, should be absorbed as an optimistic take on the job market for folks in high school or college. It does feel like a lot of the headlines that we've seen have been very doomsday.

I mean, I don't know. I talk to a lot of people who are coming outta college and first of all, many of them have done some of the things that Oren is suggesting and are still having a hard time. They've done extracurriculars, they've been presidents of clubs, they've shown leadership, they've started stuff, and it's still hard. And so I think sometimes posts are written with evocative titles to get you to read, and maybe the underlying point in the post is maybe less radical. When I read it, I was like, yeah, right now if you want to stand out, if finding a job is about standing out, the best way to stand out is to show that you get it. And I think in every market, in every moment, showing that you get it means something different. I think right now showing that you get it means that you have— I hate this word— agency. You have some fluency with AI tools and to have the wherewithal to go from idea to getting stuff done. And I think that skill is more important than ever because previously as a junior person, most of what you did was you got orders from many people, many layers above you that trickled down to you, and they told you exactly what to do. They said, take this spreadsheet, run these numbers, update it, and send it back to me. It was kind of a factory floor type model. And now I feel like even at our firm, projects are just more ambiguous. It's more like, I want to know what's happening in category X. That's the extent to which, I can't tell you what to do. I can't tell you how to do it. I can't tell you what tools to use. And I think managers and hiring managers, executives are looking for people who can take these ambiguous asks and turn them into outputs, which has always been valuable. But I feel like at companies, you always had people who could take the boss's big idea and then scope it and refine it. And by the time it got down to the junior person, it was like, fill in the spreadsheet because the spreadsheet is going to go into this deck and the deck's going to go into a meeting. And the meeting's going to go into a strategy offsite and there's going to be an answer that comes. So your piece of the puzzle is very small. And now the CEO's like, hey, I have this question. I'm shooting all the way down to you. And I don't know whether you should use Anthropic or Exo or whatever tooling you should use. I know what question I want answered. And I want someone who's smart enough to figure out how to find the answer. And I think the more you can demonstrate making something from nothing, the better your, your odds are.

I think there's like a lot of validity to the argument of once you're in the interview process, saying all these things that you've built is really helpful, but I don't know if it solves for getting out of the stack of thousands of people who are applying for jobs. To your point of there are people who have done all these things, but can't get through the first barrier, which is just getting in the seat for the interview. I think has a lot to do with like, we also have to change and shift the way that hiring managers recruit, how people even screen for candidates.

I think it's also important to talk about the world of tech. And the world of everything else. I'd argue I know a lot of people who've done all of the things that Oren mentioned here and have a hard time finding jobs in tech because you can't open X or LinkedIn without reading about a company that's laying off tons and tons and tons and tons of people. So it's very possible that the TL;DR is like, it's just very hard to get entry-level jobs in tech almost no matter what you do, which might just beg the question is, if you've got these skills, are you better off looking outside of the world of technology to apply these skills? And I think those things Oren mentioned would absolutely help you stand out in that world. I know people from top schools who've done all the things he said, who have computer science degrees, which seemed like a great idea 4 years ago, who are struggling. And the answer is, it's not that they're losing out to other candidates, they're losing out to nothing. And so I think the part about the piece that I kept coming back to is like, there are some people who just aren't hiring. It's not about, did you do enough? It's like, they're just not adding people. When I talk to candidates, it's not so much like, oh, there was a job posting, I applied for it, and my classmate got it. 50 people applied, they didn't hire anybody.

That is a story that I hear the most when I loop back to people who've reached out for help. Oh, they removed posting altogether. Last piece, he kind of predicts an enrollment crisis for universities outside the top 20, compression in student lending, and mid-level managers getting squeezed out as junior employees with AI tools outperform them. Curious, I guess, from you reading this, do you feel like any of these hold credence, or what things you're like, we need more time?

I do think, I don't know, I have this sort of romantic view, which is if colleges become trade schools, I think they're doomed. And you could argue that there's a set of colleges that maybe the value proposition doesn't make sense. I think there's a lot of things that happen to college education is one of them. Personal development, self-discovery, adulting— all of these things happen, I think, in a relatively safe place to explore these things. The jobs that come out the other end are, I think, an important part of the equation. If we get rid of college for some reason, I hope we replace it with something that feels similar, that allows people to go from being literally teenagers to adults and to go through some of the exploration of like, what I want to be, who am I outside of my family, parents, and my home community. These are important things, and I would hate to see us lose the space for people to those, and maybe it's less centered around knowledge. And ironically, the knowledge that seems to be most interesting, which tends to be the humanities, social sciences, interpersonal communication, is all the stuff people crapped on for the last 15 years as being useless and soft skills. It turns out, I mean, I say this as an economics and Spanish major who cares deeply about the humanities, I find it highly ironic that all the stuff people told people was a waste of your time apparently now is the only thing that matters.

Yeah. And even I think we could look back at COVID and the college students who were there that got that taken away from them, that experience as a look into what that looks like when that experience is disrupted. My younger sister was one of them. And I think that transition into adulthood is different. And not to say— because there's people who don't go to college at all and transition well— but I think to your point, we just have to be able to find some sort of bridge that allows people to have the opportunity to experience what it's like in that safe environment. Our next piece is from Elena Berner's Substack titled "I See Work Is the New Career Flex." Elena makes the case that the old corporate ladder, the one where your title and the size of your headcount were the primary signals of success, is being quietly dismantled. She introduces the concept of the high impact individual contributor, also known as the high C, a person with no direct reports who can do what used to require an entire team end to end and get paid like a leader for it. The unlock, as she frames it, is AI functioning as average intelligence, meaning a single senior person can now pair their actual craft with AI to cover the gaps that previously required a designer, PM, or an engineer to fill. Elena is living this herself at Lovable, having moved back into an IC role after flattening the organization, and she says 90% of her time is now spent on the parts of the job she actually loves. The piece closes with a clear challenge to leaders: stop juggling decks and cross-functional alignment and get back in touch with the craft that started your career. We have been talking about the rise of individual contributors for a while internally and how important they are to a team. So want to pause here for what your thoughts were.

I think branding and naming things is important, and I think high C is going to stick. That's my belief. I think if you look at a lot of the discourse around AI-related layoffs, you know, you read about what Evan's Beagle said about Snapchat, there are two things that are happening I think that are related. One is a desire on the part of the most senior people in organizations to get access to the information that they really need to make decisions with fewer intermediaries who might shape or otherwise massage that information. And second, I think the first and only time I was a product manager, I met a guy in our company. I'm like, well, what does that guy do? They go, oh, he's like a— he's like our chief scientist. Like, oh, he doesn't have any reports. Yeah, he just likes to write code. He doesn't want to be an engineering manager. He's not our CTO. He's just really good engineer. And I think a long time ago, technical careers realized that, like, if you force every good person to be a manager as opposed to an IC in order to advance their career, you are going to, some cases, get the worst of all worlds. People could have thrived as individual contributors and who are not interested in management, you're going to lose the benefit of their individual contributions, and you're going to force them into a management path that they don't have any interest in. Your organization will be worse off. And they've kind of figured out how to have that, like, individual contributor slash manager path. We've never really had that for other careers. This is part general view that we're all mimicking software development organizations little by little every day. We're rediscovering what they've discovered. And I think that the allure of this is for a lot of people like, hey, I became a marketer because I like marketing and now I don't do marketing. I manage a bunch of marketing managers and directors who do the marketing. I wish I could get back to doing marketing. And it used to be like the only way to do that was to take a gigantic step backwards in your career. Yeah. If people would even allow you. I mentioned to you guys in our team meeting, I've seen some of my friends as GPs who are like, I wanna do a summer internship this summer. I want to go back and work in a company as an IC part Partially, I think to get a better sense of like what's actually possible with these tools, but also partially 'cause I think there's something that's magical about building stuff and doing stuff. And the tooling today allows you to do a lot more. And management is mostly about helping other people do stuff and directing the work of others, but it's not actually about doing stuff.

AI is obviously the catalyst for people to have interest in, in doing things like you mentioned of taking a summer internship as like a GP of a fund. Would you make the argument that people in their management positions should always be trying to get down to the ground floor level and trying to learn about like what's happening in the front line? Lines, or do you feel like that just becomes near to impossible because you're just juggling management, which, as you know, doing it takes a lot of time in the people management world?

I think part of the problem is the construct of management hierarchy in most firms. So, I mean, the one way a lot of people have tried to get rid of this previously, like anthropic, like everybody's a member of the technical staff. You're seeing a rise again of these like titleless companies. I think the problem is when you have hierarchy, when you have a CEO and a VP and a director and a senior manager and a manager and an IC. If the CEO goes from CEO to IC, you're skipping a lot of people and it makes those people nervous. And I think a lot of the challenges are the social dynamics of management hierarchies, which is that also you're going to terrify that IC if you show up in their office and just say, hey, I'm the CEO of the company, I got a question for you. That person's going to be like, uh, yeah. And so those layers are designed ideally to filter, protect, and scope that work as it goes down the chain. But it means as a CEO, you have to work through this system of having an idea, you gotta let it go all the way down. It's kind of like a boomerang, go all the way down to the bottom, it's got to come all the way back and you hope it looks like the thing that you wanted.

I think there's a lot of positives that'll come out of this. One of my biggest realizations as an adult when I came into the working world was that, oh, just 'cause you're a manager doesn't mean you're good at managing people. No. Everyone who's had a boss can name a story of one that was just a horrible experience. And nobody tells you that when you're not in the corporate world. You just think that older people, more senior people are better at their job and also know how to manage people. Turns out completely different skill set. I do think about though, Elena, her model makes a lot of sense when you're talking about seasoned operators who have 10 to 15 years of craft under their belt. But I guess what happens to the generation coming up behind them if AI is absorbing the execution work that junior employees traditionally used to grow into? Where do the next wave of high ICs actually develop those skills, I guess, and make the differentiation of, I would actually like to manage teams, and that's something interesting if, if they've never seen it done in the way that it was done previously.

I really don't know. The only analogy I've been able to use, and it's not perfect, is I have a bunch of friends who are in consulting, investment banking, and law in— during the global financial crisis, the GFC in 2008. And they didn't hire junior classes in those years. They're like, financially it's hard, we're up on the— we're on the ropes. And the problem is, in jobs like that, you go through this linear progression. And so in some cases, my friend said, hey, like, we have this donut hole of partners that would have been people that we'd hired that year that we didn't hire them. So when it was time for that cohort to graduate, there was no one there. And I worry that like something similar will happen here, which is that everything will be fine. Maybe the bet is that the AI will be good enough at some point that it won't be an issue because you won't, you won't need the junior people, which is very dystopian. But I think the risk we run by not making these investments is that if in 3 or 4 years we realize, oh, we needed more entry-level computer scientists than we thought we did, you can't go back in time. I think this is going to be fascinating to see what happens in 5 years for the companies who just said we're done with junior people, we're like not going to make the management or educational investment, we're just take these high Cs. When the high Cs retire, we'll see what happens. But I think there's a set of people who are just saying by then AI will be good enough and that when the high Cs retire, they might be getting pushed out the door anyway.

I do remember one thing in consulting, this kind of model of high C almost existed. You could either go be the partner route, do all the normal stuff, or you could be like a specialist. It meant you were never going to manage teams on the ground in projects. You would just swoop in. And I remember talking to my friend when we were like one year out of college and a specialist came to our project and they were amazing, wealth of knowledge. And I was like, God, I wish we worked for them. And my friend was like, do you think that there's are a pleasure to hang out with because they don't actually manage people, and so they don't have to turn that on, so they can kind of spar with you and joke around? Or do you think it's actually just because maybe they have a super good leader in them? It's funny to think how it could transform. One last quick news flash before we sign off. Reports from basically every news outlet appeared on Wednesday that OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for a US IPO in the coming weeks, targeting a public debut as early as September, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and looking to raise at least $60 billion at the low end at a valuation of up to $1 trillion. This comes 2 days after OpenAI defeated Elon Musk's legal challenge. Obviously wanted your quick reaction to this one, Charles, about the timing, the valuations, and, and what does it mean for the broader IPO market if both OpenAI and SpaceX actually get up?

Yeah, I've enjoyed reading my friends' takes on the SpaceX S-1. I think it helps crystallize a little bit more what's actually happening inside these businesses, which, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of speculation, but now there's a lot of facts. I'm very curious to see what happens. With, particularly with OpenAI. SpaceX is different. You have Elon, you have like, that's like a different thing. I just think OpenAI is for most people the most closely identified with AI company. It has hundreds of millions of monthly active users. If there's ever a company that I think could have a tremendous retail uptake, it's OpenAI. I can see people just saying like, this is my bet on AI. But I also will be curious to see what lessons OpenAI learns from being a public company and whether that trickles down into changing the interest level that late-stage private companies have in going public. Well, this pull Databricks and Stripe and some of those other more highly valued companies off the sidelines, or will it give them like more reason to pause? Well, more to come.

I'm sure we'll see a flood of news over the next week or so, but we are all out of time for today. Thank you, Charles, for stopping in. Thank you to our listeners for hopping in as well. Please like and subscribe, and we will talk with you all next week. Thank you. Bye.