Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

This week we touch on a topic that keeps uncovering more valuable data each week – our grey-headed interpersonal skills are very valuable in the AI economy.

Let's get into it.

I had absolutely no master plan as a senior in college.

An English major who thought he wanted to write for Sports Illustrated. I interviewed with a few publishing houses in New York over Spring Break. Dismal outcome. I learned that my first job would probably be writing obituaries for a small town newspaper.

My father helped me pivot with some excellent advice. He understood that my first job was probably not going to be a career, but simply my first business experience.

His exact quote was about understanding the difference between line and staff positions. Every company has both. Just how did a company make money? Make sure you’re on the side that generates revenue. Sales is the job that matters most.

So I interviewed for sales positions. And landed one. And gave up on the writing career until this late-career side hustle.

Line vs. staff has a much sharper lens today — after Elon fired 80% of Twitter employees when he purchased that company. Staff bloat had rendered the platform into a typical 8000-employee Silicon Valley big tech company.

They’ve hired a few hundred people back, but today X.com is working well with approximately 2000 employees.

Jack Dorsey, another tech titan who has been right and early multiple times – recently cut 40+% of the staff at Block (formerly Square) a company with a $39b market cap.

This time it’s because recent advances in AI tools are forcing Block to remake itself as a slimmer, more nimble entity. Block has removed layers of middle management and is delivering better products faster.

These stories are the canary in the coal mine for the Fortune 500. It’s not just big tech who will benefit from efficiency gains - its Financial Services, Healthcare, Engineering, Retail, Ecommerce, Consulting and more. Shareholders will demand it.

All the ‘Learn-to-code’ people have been wrong for a long time. Coding has become a commodity. High-leverage engineers with AI can do 10x-100x what they could two years ago.

You know what these firms are not cutting?

Sales.

There's a reason for that.

Sales is the original line function. It's how a company touches money. It requires judgment, trust, relationship, and the ability to read a room — none of which a model can own on your behalf. The same goes for anyone who can originate ideas, see patterns before the data confirms them, or walk into a conversation and understand what someone actually needs versus what they say they need.

My father didn't know anything about AI. He knew that companies have a center of gravity — and that gravity is always revenue. Everything else is infrastructure for the people doing the revenue work. That distinction is older than org charts. It just got a lot more visible when Elon fired 6,000 people and the site didn't go down.

You spent decades building the kind of judgment that can't be measured — and according to a February 2026 MIT Sloan working paper, that's precisely what the agentic economy is about to make scarce and premium. The paper puts it plainly: when AI makes execution abundant, the binding constraint becomes verification. The ability to audit, steer, and underwrite decisions. That's not a junior skill. That's forty years of being in the room.

The question isn't whether AI will take your job. The question is whether you're positioned on the line — where judgment, relationships, and ideas create value — or on the staff side, where execution is being handed to machines faster than anyone predicted.

I am grateful that my father gave me that view 40+ years ago. The economy just made it more urgent.

If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on your experience rather than your title — this is it.

Now go launch something 🚀

Are you questioning how AI can really benefit you? Are you unimpressed with ChatGPT? Here’s a great first step to reduce friction in whatever you type.

Just talk into any app on your phone.

I started using Wispr a few months ago to streamline adding personal notes. Grocery store items, newsletter topics, To Do’s – the kind of stuff I typically typed into an iphone reminder.

Today, I’m dictating detailed ideas directly into my Notion inbox, framing up complete Launch Key issues.

Easy win making AI work for me.

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