The individual is becoming more powerful than ever. The infrastructure around the individual has not caught up.
That sentence is the whole of our work, and the labour market is where it shows first.
One person, a department's output
A competent person with current tools can now produce what a small team produced five years ago. This is not a prediction. It is visible in what people ship on their own, in how quickly a single founder can get to a working product, in how much of a professional's week is now spent directing work rather than doing it.
What has not changed is everything around that person. They still find work the way people found work in 2010. They still prove what they can do with a document that lists where they have been rather than what they have made. They still assemble their tools, their collaborators, their contracts and their operating discipline by hand, one decision at a time.
The capability went up. The scaffolding stayed where it was.
What a CV is actually for
A CV is a compression format designed for a world where checking was expensive. You could not watch someone work, so you read a summary of the places that had already accepted them, and you used that as a proxy.
The proxy is now much worse than the thing it replaced. You can see what someone built. You can read how they reason. You can work with them for an afternoon before committing to anything. The expensive part of hiring was never the assessment, it was the access, and access is what got cheap.
We do not believe in CVs because we do not have to. We prefer matching on values and finding out by building something together. It is slower to start and very much faster to be sure about.
Merit over geography
The other thing that got cheap is distance, and the labour market has still not priced it correctly.
A talented person in Lagos, Tbilisi or Da Nang is, for most software work, exactly as useful as one in San Francisco, and is paid as though geography were a skill. That gap is not a moral observation, it is an arbitrage that will close, and the companies that close it early will be better staffed than the ones that wait.
Our position is simple: talented people should be able to contribute regardless of where they live. Not as charity, and not as cost reduction. Because the alternative is losing to whoever figures it out first.
The part that worries us
There is a version of this that is very bad, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
If the tools keep getting better and the scaffolding does not, the gains concentrate. The people who already had access to capital, networks and context compound faster, and everyone else competes with an agent for the work that used to be a career.
The infrastructure question is therefore not a technical one. It decides which of the two versions we get. We are building for the second on purpose, and we would rather be measured on whether it worked than on whether we said the right things about it.