Agency is Eating the World

True agency is an unruly psychological trait. It’s the willingness to act without explicit validation, instruction, or even permission. It’s the meme “you can just do things,” knowing that “you can poke life, and something will pop out the other side.”2

The share of solo-founder startups has almost doubled in the last few years2, and the first examples of businesses with a handful of employees generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue have emerged. Henri Shi, who spent nearly a decade growing super.com into a $150M ARR business, is now tracking the progress towards Altman’s one-person ... See more

You don't need to be in tech to have high agency. Yet you'll find most of these people there, as they naturally gravitate toward low-structure, high-impact environments — namely, startups.

We don't live in a world that's kind to generalists.

Well, until AI, that is.

The critical dividing line in our economy is no longer simply education or specialization, but rather agency itself: the raw determination to make things happen without waiting for permission.

The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level global picture. It’s less about knowing how to patch a system and more about knowing that it needs to be patched. It’s more about architecture, and less about implementation. Precisely where generalists ... See more