From Growth at All Cost to Productivity at All Cost
From futuristic dishwashers to AI toolkits, we’ve promised freedom for decades. Will we finally make room for brilliance?
We spent a decade in the growth-at-all-cost era.
ZIRP, blitzscaling, DTC darlings, or whatever it took to go up and to the right.
Then the tide shifted.
Founders were pushed to grow without the infrastructure or discernment to build lasting businesses. From a venture perspective, that created companies too expensive to acquire and too shaky to take public.
You don’t want your exit to peak with the press release.
However, something else is now happening.
We’re entering what feels like a new era: productivity at all cost.
AI is powering a lot of it. Tools are smarter. Teams are leaner. Job reqs are held to new standards: “Don’t post it unless you can prove AI can’t do it.”
Productivity is good until it becomes the goal itself.
When we stop asking where humans still scale best, we risk erasing the layer that creates enduring value.
The human layer.
I was talking with a friend who works across marketing and AI, and he mentioned how much this moment echoes the 1950s and 60s.
GE. Disney. Those futuristic commercials that promised automated homes, robotic appliances, and dishwashers that would give you your life back.
The message?
You are brilliant, but your brilliance is wasted on the mundane.
Let machines handle the rest.
That dream lingered. But what we got instead was a rising productivity bar, intensified expectations, and deeper burnout, with no meaningful expansion of time to actually think.
So now the question is:
Will this era be any different?
As someone building a fund, I know where I’m placing my bet.
On leaders who know how to leverage technology in the service of human brilliance.
On founders who understand that creativity, resilience, and empathy don’t appear in LLMs, but they scale effectively when invested in.
We’ve automated the mundane.
Now let’s see if we can reclaim the sacred: time, presence, and the kind of thinking machines can’t do.
-e
I’m Booked - Four Thousand Weeks
I just finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t just challenge your calendar—it challenges your theology of time.