The next managerial revolution
David Peterson

Like seemingly everybody else, I spent the holidays playing around with Claude Code. And like seemingly everybody else, yes, I’m floored. It’s incredibly powerful.

(I haven’t had the chance to use Clause Cowork. But I think this piece is made even more relevant by its launch yesterday!)

So powerful, in fact, that I felt a new kind of anxiety every night when I went to bed. I’d look at my laptop and think to myself…what project can I set up so that Claude stays productive while I’m gone?

I wasn’t stressed about a deadline. There wasn’t any pressure. I was just building fun side projects. But I was anxious about wasting idle capacity. I had this tireless, capable and infinitely energetic intern at my fingertips, and any moment I spent resting felt like a waste.

This isn’t a novel realization, but it was striking to feel it first hand. It was almost akin to managing a team of people. Like a good manager, I wanted to make sure Claude had direction and knew “what good looks like” and wasn’t blocked. But actually I think the closest comparison is playing a real-time strategy game like Age of Empires or Factorio. Success in managing agents, just like in those games, depends on setting the right strategy from the start and context-switching between multiple parallel tasks without losing track.

This highlights an uncomfortable truth: we, human beings, are the bottleneck. AI is too fast, too good at building. That late-night anxiety is the realization that we are the lag in the system. This is why so many people --dangerously-skip-permissions. This is why Ralph Wiggum went viral over the holidays. We’re all desperately trying to remove ourselves as the bottleneck.

And here’s my hot take. This is actually the opening that business schools have been waiting for - if they have the guts to take it.

The lost art of systems thinking

As a somewhat embarrassed recipient of an MBA, I can say that business schools are currently close to worthless. But they didn’t used to be. In the mid-20th century, business schools were at the frontier of a genuine revolution.

Back then, corporations had grown so massive that they were breaking. Business owners couldn’t “walk the floor” of a global corporation like they could a factory. Business schools became the places where leaders learned how to manage at a distance. And this required rebuilding the conception of a company and how it was run. (Go read My Years with General Motors by Alfred Sloan for just one example.)

In particular, it was the era of something called operations research. A few pillars worth highlighting:

• Drucker’s “Management by Exception”: Figuring out how to ignore the 90% of things going right so you can focus on the 10% that are broken.

• Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints”: Identifying the one link in the chain that limited the entire system’s throughput is what matters. (Check out The Goal).

• Linear Programming: Using math to allocate scarce resources (steel, labor, capital) across competing projects to maximize output.

Back then, business school provided the frameworks, math and mental models to treat a company like a machine. But over the last few decades, that knowledge became democratized. And the leverage provided by an MBA has diminished as a result.

But today, we’re facing a new sort of management crisis. For the first time since the 1950s, our "labor" (AI agents) is significantly faster than our "management" (us).

The cost of doing is approaching zero, and the benefit of deciding is higher than ever. We don’t need business leaders who can direct from afar, we need systems architects. We need a new generation of operations research to figure out how to manage thousands of autonomous agents without the whole thing turning into a digital Gordian knot.

To be honest, I’m not sure if business schools can do it. This all probably gets open sourced on X before anybody in academia can figure it out. But if business schools want to be relevant again, they need to stop teaching people how to "network" and start teaching them how to orchestrate.

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Hard markets are hard- Nvidia’s ambition to extend its dominance beyond chips and into industrial software highlights a recurring truth about enterprise markets: technical advantage alone is not enough. Omniverse, Nvidia’s digital twin platform for factories, logistics, and industrial design, was pitched as a way to bring Nvidia’s compute moat into the physical world and capture a slice of the $50 trillion manufacturing and logistics industries. Internally, expectations were expansive. But four years on, the commercial reality looks more modest. “After four years of effort, Nvidia’s attempts to turn the Omniverse software into a money-making business have made little progress, according to four current and former Nvidia employees familiar with the business.”

HOW TO STARTUP

Investor fit. Susan Liu argues that Series A fundraising has changed materially, especially in this post-LLM environment. In crowded markets shaped by LLMs, growth expectations have reset upward. Traction isn’t the whole story, but it has become the primary gating factor for attention.“Simply put: growth expectations have skyrocketed. While traction is not the whole story, it is the first filter. To get meetings and to stand out in a crowded AI landscape, you need to be on a genuinely compelling growth trajectory.” She also highlights a shift in how founders should think about investor selection. “At the Series A, meeting the right partner matters just as much as meeting the right firm. In categories where LLMs are having a very large impact, this matters even more. When you find the investor who has a real understanding of your space, that’s the person you should lean into. They’re far more likely to engage deeply and ultimately be the one who gives you a term sheet.’

Its up to the founder. Capital is more available than ever, earlier, and at a lower apparent cost. Will Quist argues that what’s changed is the availability of signals.“There’s just so much more money available to founders now — earlier, faster, and at a lower apparent cost. What’s less clear is that many founders are still using old mental models to interpret what being able to raise money actually means.” Quist argues that many of the hardest questions about starting a company remain unresolved by capital. “How many genuinely novel assumptions does this rely on? What will it cost to prove those assumptions right or wrong? How does value accrue along the way?” Those questions, he argues, can no longer be outsourced to venture investors.

Rebranding: Reset. In conversation with Alex Chisnall, Molten Ventures’ marketing director, James Clark argues that brand is often misunderstood — and misused.“Most founders think of brand as the surface layer. The truth is far more uncomfortable. A brand exposes what a company believes about itself. It tests how aligned a team really is.” Clark frames rebranding not as a cosmetic project, but as a signal of strategic intent. ‘There is a lesson here for any founder. Your brand is not a static asset. It is not a logo. It is the sum of how people understand your company and why it exists. As your business evolves, the brand must evolve with it. If it does not, it becomes a drag on your growth… Founders often ask when they should rebrand. The answer is simple. When the current brand no longer reflects your ambition... When the market has moved and your identity has not. A rebrand is not a cosmetic project. It is a strategic reset. It’s what happens when the current brand no longer reflects your ambition.’ When branding lags the business, it becomes friction rather than leverage.

HOW TO VENTURE

Bubble Burst. Kenn So argues that AI is not a bubble in the traditional sense, but that parts of its financial structure are under strain. Rather than pointing to euphoric equity markets, So focuses on the economics of infrastructure financing.“While not yet a full-blown crisis, credit and equity markets are showing clear signs of stress specifically related to this risk... What they indicate is targeted concern about the gap between GPU economic lives and the financing structures built around them… If the risk materializes, the result wouldn’t look like a market-wide crash… The stress would likely surface in credit markets first—in private loan defaults, securitized asset writedowns, and distressed refinancings—before rippling into equity markets as the hyperscalers eventually take the writedowns. The investors exposed to this risk are not the ones betting on AI. Its the ones betting on scarcity.’

Valuation stretch. Drawing on the dot-com era, SVB’s latest State of the Markets report argues that platform shifts create extraordinary winners — but also many disappointments.“As we saw with the dot-com era, early adopters of platform shifts are often not the market winners.” The implication is not that innovation is overvalued, but that outcomes will be uneven. “It is likely many companies won’t achieve high returns, but the best companies could get so big they make up for the failures.” 

A reminder that excess often shows up first in expectations, not technology.

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CruxOCM
Pipeline Simulation Engineer (Vancouver or Houston)

DualBird
Senior Software Engineer (Tel Aviv, Remote)

Groundcover
DevRel (SF, Hybrid)