Jason M. Lemkin describes a phenomenon he calls “invisible unemployment”: companies achieving high growth without adding headcount, leading to fewer entry-level and mid-pack hiring opportunities. He warns this trend—driven by higher revenue-per-employee targets, hiring freezes, and substitution strategies (including AI/backfill rhetoric)—will intensify during the year and disproportionately stress both entry-level workers and senior executives. A second speaker discusses reskilling prospects for younger workers (e.g., 22-year-olds) and emphasizes personal agency.
Chapters
I call it invisible unemployment. And it's all around us and it's going to grow this year. It doesn't show up in the government numbers yet, but it's everywhere. It's Shopify saying for the third year in the row they can hit insane growth without adding any, any headcount. For the third year it's every single CEO wanting to keep headcount flat and backfill with AI. This is not AI. These are not robots firing us, okay? This is tighter and tighter companies, radically higher ARR per employee and no one wanting to hire entry level people, no one wanting to hire mid pack people, no one wanting to hire work from home people. So I call it invisible unemployment. And it may benefit us as VCs, which is a terrible thing to say. It may benefit, it'll make our companies more efficient and make us more money and make them move faster and iterate faster. But I am really worried by the end of this year we're going to feel, smell and live in this invisible unemployment and it's, it's going to be a big deal. There'll be. This is the year we will see the end of so many entry level sales jobs. And so all these entry level jobs are, it is, they are truly disappearing in front of us and in the senior execs and the entry level are going to be under massive stress in 2026. Massive stress.
Unlike 55 year olds, 22 year olds can reskill and you can save yourself and I, you know we've all been through periods of our life where things didn't work out so I do think they have to have a little more age. If at 22 you're saying it's not fair, woe is me, then I think you need to have a lot more agency. So that's what I believe but I'm not saying that's what they believe.
And kids don't, don't have, most of them don't want to grind in the. The thing is these entry level jobs, these AI jobs, not only might you not skill for their heart, they're like more work than the old jobs. They're harder jobs and they're more hours and they're more intellectual and they're more work and throughout history just most people have not wanted to work that hard.
