The Elevator: Vibecore, AI Culture, Founder Roles
"The most valuable selfhood is the one that is scarce enough to be non-fungible, yet legible enough to circulate frictionlessly"
The Elevator: Curated inputs to elevate your business and expand your lifestyle.
Meditations on the Founder Role
What do you even do all day?
It’s not an accusation, exactly. But it lives in between… In-between co-founders, or sometimes it’s just in your own head as you question yourself, or imagine your team is questioning you.
Role ambiguity is the norm for founders. You create your role, and you recreate it over and over again. Unlike traditional employees with defined responsibilities and measurable outputs, your job changes constantly.
Whereas most employees work in the present moment, founders live in the future. Your role is to imagine six months or six years from now. During fundraising, one founder vanishes for weeks and months.
Leadership becomes more ambiguous the higher you go. This is easy to forget. The most clearly defined jobs belong to those with the least power. Tasks are explicit. Outcomes are measured, and the feedback loop is tight.
At the top, things are messier. The responsibilities are more conceptual. The time horizons are longer. So when someone asks you what you do all day, and you find yourself struggling to answer.
Being a “Team Player”
Even if we understand this intellectually, it doesn’t make the dynamic less frustrating.
Sometimes your team wants to loop you into something that you could help with. And yes, you probably could help. You could take on that task. You could solve that problem. You could pick up the slack. But you also know that’s not what is most helpful for you to spend your time on. You’re stuck between contributing and being seen vs. working on what the business really needs. The test is: if you solve that problem yourself, will it stay solved? Or are you just delaying the moment when someone else must learn to lead it?
Changing Identities
Your job is to see what others can’t. Leadership is about going into the places that others are avoiding, or can’t see, or don’t want to speak about. A founder who tries to be another team member often can’t see from the same perspective and see clearly. Your value doesn’t always need to be obvious for it to be important. You don’t want to let others define your value by how easy it is to explain your day.
You think about the future.
You change your role based on what the business needs.
And as much as you’d love to be able to simply explain what you do… by the time you take the time to try and communicate it, you’ve changed again…
xx David
On to the links…
My good friend Will launched Act Two, “It’s a six-week online program to help you complete a creative project and launch your Second Act. Here’s why we’re building it.”
RepAI, an “AI That Transforms Conversations into Revenue”
Ryan Holiday, “How to Save Your Family from the Algorithm” The picture was not for anything. In fact, the phone was capturing an actual moment, and our actual family life—with its fair share of insanity and complete meltdowns never far away.
This is not what you see on social media. No one posts about life’s mediocrity or their own deficiencies as parents. They don’t share their mistakes or their unflattering angles.”
From Vibecore: the economics of authenticity; “The market doesn't want perfectly unique weirdness. It wants vibes that can be both unmistakable and transmissible. This is the strange paradox of our moment: the most valuable selfhood is the one that is scarce enough to be non-fungible, yet legible enough to circulate frictionlessly through the algorithmic and economic marketplace.”
Kevin Kelly, always a total visionary: “Thesis: The missing element in forecasting the future of AI is to understand that AI needs culture just as humans need culture.” (KK, AI Epizone)
Quotes and Sign Posts…
“If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help.” — Seymour Chwast
“In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao [Way], every day something is dropped.”
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. – Simone Weil.”
Have a great weekend,