What Will Your Great-Grandchildren Think?
Time is precious. How we choose to spend our professional lives impacts our finances, our fulfillment, and in some cases, our legacy. It is only natural to consider how our descendants will assess how we chose to spend our lives.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the robber barons amassed unimaginable wealth. History offers a somewhat mixed perspective on the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans. Were their monopolistic practices devastating to countless small businesses? Certainly. Were their philanthropic and industrial efforts impactful for the future education and social development of American society? Certainly.1
When we look back upon these spectacular figures, we are awed and appalled, impressed and conflicted. Regardless, their threads are woven into the tapestry of modern life, and their legacies (to say nothing of all the structures bearing their names) ensure that they will never be forgotten.
Management
I have little interest in litigating the morals of earlier industrialists. I am not certain whether their arrival and the antitrust laws that followed were a net benefit globally. I am, however, certain that those corporate titans employed a prodigious number of senior directors and vice presidents.
Their names are lost to history. Their legacies are nonexistent. Most likely, they were well-educated, affluent suburbanites, spending leisure hours on tennis courts and golf courses, raising children in Victorian homes and educating them in private schools, and generally enjoying the comforts of their age.
They were decent folks in most cases, I suspect. Some were probably charitable and otherwise upstanding members of society.
But their great-grandchildren probably have little to offer more than a moment’s thought to their great-grandparent, the senior director of procurement for the northern midwestern region at Standard Oil, circa 1900.
21st Century Moguls and Magnates
Now, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan are long gone. In their place, stand Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. Modern monopolists, comparably wealthy titans of the software age. Their legacies are also likely to be mixed and complicated. Judge them as you will, but we are all, to some extent, impressed with what they have accomplished.
What about senior directors of software engineering at those companies? Their salaries might provide access to the finest of veggie smoothies and avocado toasts,2 and their lives might be similarly secure. But like the managers of the previous century, they too will find themselves lost to history.
And with respect to those managers of yesteryear, fewer alternatives were available. These robber barons were not only monopolists, but to a lesser degree monopsonists.3 To generate the salary required to support a comfortable life for one’s family, it would have been challenging to avoid employment by a robber baron or one of their subsidiaries.
Today’s salary discrepancies are real, but hardly as profound. Standing in opposition to FAANG still allows a high standard of living, and AE’s equity portfolio is far more diversified among clients and internal projects than many of the behemoths. Choosing to spend the best years of your life at a FAANG company when an alternative exists might one day be seen as analogous to enriching oneself beneath a ruthless feudal lord or a sociopathic robber baron’s senior VP who was unconcerned with unemployment and poverty. Both were perceived as a legitimate economic strategy in their respective eras. Horrifying in retrospect, but lucrative in the moment.
At AE, we’re taking the long view.
Legacy
If you wanted to maximize your base salary 100 years ago, finding a position among the ranks of a large, industrial conglomerate was a safe bet. If you want to maximize your base salary today, go work for a FAANG company.
Personally, I have shed the collared shirts of finance and consulting-adjacent work for an NY-based professional services firm for the heady, aspirational, hairier tech world. For myself, and for my colleagues, the goal is not an additional $100,000 in annual salary, but the opportunity to create and amass generational wealth, and then seeing that such wealth is deployed in the pursuit of increasing human agency.
Who will your older self wish your younger self had worked for?
Whose sales pitch do you wish to enhance? What will you stand for and what will you oppose? Employees of AE are, both with their work and their choice of who to work for, opposing the surveillance capitalists of the 21st century.
At every age, we lament scarce resources. In youth, it is often money. In our senior years, it is often time. To what will your older self wish that the most precious of resources had been allocated? Moreover, given the exponential growth of investments (and time is an investment, make no mistake), in retrospect, the investment of that time will be either a source of anguish or comfort.
Romance
Do you think I am a prisoner of a cultish devotion to my employer? Perhaps, in some dorkish manner, this is just a “walk-on part in [AE’s] war” rather than a “lead role in [FAANG’s] cage.”4
A rich life requires the exercise of free will5 and freedom of thought. It requires personal expression, and self determination.
We joke. We say what we want to say, even if those comments are irreverent and outside the norms of buttoned-up discourse. My conversations with clients contain the informality and gratuitous application of song lyrics and movie references that make my wife question her marital choices.
In short, I am myself at work in a manner that previously seemed unthinkable.
The tyranny of short-term gains
Too often, clarity is obscured by the dark cloud of short-term gains, which in terms of salary, means a FAANG company. Of course, consider the implication of that faustian bargain. When Amazon or Google or Facebook double their revenue, how much of a benefit does that employee receive? Now, when times are tougher, tech companies are likely to begin shedding headcount in droves. (Ominous, given current economic conditions).
The FAANG companies have defined a world largely impervious to market conditions—a high salary for optimizing algorithms to the tune of 0.01% improvements as we harvest ever more behavioral data from a captive society.
One reductive view of American freedom, especially from the perspective of those beyond its borders is low taxes and guns. True freedom, however, is the ability to choose how to invest your time and your energy - and to what end. The folks at AE are placing their bets upon the fact that, in the long run, increasing human agency is better for the world, and better business. That hypothesis is being proven as incubated AE projects are sold for millions.
Our novel approach to developer equity and our evaluation of what that equity is worth are certainly worth a read—they suggest that those who stick around are likely to receive an upside that will outpace FAANG salaries and do so while enjoying a professional environment where we take our work, but not ourselves, too seriously.6
Exploration
The American pioneers, as they progressed east-to-west, engendered a spirit of exploration and innovation that might explain why most of the inventions defining the past 150 years were invented on American soil. The steam engine. The automobile. The assembly line. The airplane. The personal computer. The iPhone. This is American exceptionalism.
The intellectual capital to create these devices came from folks born in the US and elsewhere, but that spirit of exploration led the pioneers westward. Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley, a west-coast archetype if ever there was, has generated more economic value than any city in the history of the planet.
And it lost its way. No longer innovative, free-thinking, and provocative. They are captured, safe, timid, and more concerned with optimizing and incrementalism than the types of world-shifting development that sprung from garages in prior decades. This is the difference between the hunger of entrepreneurs in garages challenging the existing order and multi-billion-dollar entities chasing Q4’s earnings targets.
FAANG employees are not free to be contrarians, which incidentally, is a precursor to disruption and innovation. They are no longer free to “explore.”
They may be wealthy in a materialistic sense, but like the managers serving robber barons, their impacts are muted. We might ask the average FAANG employee, in the words of Bane (before he unceremoniously dispatches billionaire and Wayne-rival John Daggett in “The Dark Knight Rises”), “do you feel powerful?”
Or in our words, “do you have agency?”
BCI
AE’s long-term vision differs from the surveillance giants of the 21st century. You can participate in our vision to create an agency-increasing brain-computer-interface operating system (BCI OS) via the same development, data science, and design work in which you’d partake at any large entity.
We aren’t encumbered by outside shareholder interests or the insistence of VC or PE firms. Just as Google’s founders were originally insistent that search results not be corrupted by the inclusion of advertisements (and shareholder interests ultimately won out) and even Facebook resisted the siren song of advertising and data harvesting for a while as well, the developers of BCI will eventually face that pressure. The dystopian future in which an algorithm decodes your intimate urges and neuromarkets you something to satisfy that inner desire (and manipulates you by stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain directly whilst they advertise, and so on and so forth) is the future to which FAANG’s technology leads. AE has forgone outside capital or even the need for ROI from its BCI work - our development and data science consulting, along with the skunkworks we incubate, is the capital to support that pursuit.
You can partake. A lead role breaking free of FAANG’s cage. Our principles focus us not on virtue signaling, but effective altruism - donating 5% of our profits monthly to solve what ails our world.
BCI will solve much of what sucks about modern living. The frustrations of ubiquitous, attention-diminishing technology that we all understand, lament, and grudgingly accept because of the convenience they provide. We also have acquiesced to some idea that there is nothing to be done.
Today, we struggle to communicate complete thoughts, even to our future selves (ever tried taking notes in a meeting then struggled to discern what exactly your former self wanted your future self to do?). Today we are forced to attempt and fail at multitasking by technology that ensures that before one act or thought is completed, another will distract.
We can do better. And in the long run, it will be a better business model.
Agency
So what’s it gonna be? The pursuit of a narrow materialistic objective in the service of modern robber barons? An economic model where when they win you receive a little and when they lose, they still win and you might be laid off? A model impervious to market conditions isn’t “safe,” it’s the absence of any skin in the game and the absence of freedom and upside. When market conditions shift, FAANG employees are still in the crosshairs, as are the VC-backed startups with unprofitable businesses that cannot justify the money raised. A bootstrapped AE seems safer and a source of greater upside.
We are pursuing human agency on both a broader and narrower scale. Are you free to express yourself in prose and code?
Are you free to be a contrarian?
Do you feel free?
It’s your career, your life, and your legacy. We all have bills to pay. But if you have the appetite for risk, some entrepreneurial hustle, and sleep soundly with the knowledge of having increased human agency, come make your mark.
1 Between the Bessemer process, the Frasch-Burton process, other industrial innovation, and the connection/integration of the nation, there were clearly some value-adds.
2 Nothing against avocado toast, which my wife loves.
3 For those who do not recall their economics lectures, a ‘monopsony’ refers to a single source of employment for a skill rather than a single source of a good for a consumer. To wit, if you are one of the best 30 quarterbacks on planet earth, the only employer capable of paying you eight figures annually is the NFL. The Arena football league is not a viable alternative (they’ll pay you well under 10% of what the NFL offers), and in turn, this limits bargaining power for the employee.
4 Pink Floyd, “Wish you were here”
5 Not an invitation for a digression about the hard problem of consciousness and whether or not free will truly exists. At a minimum, and relevant for the sake of this discussion, we behave as though, in our own minds, we are exercising free will? Capisce?
6 They pay me to write parodies, just sayin’.