Elon Musk, a member of the Paypal Mafia, said at the 14th Peter Diamandis Abundance Summit that: “Basically, AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans. If we grow 1,000 times more than our current economy, you probably have already saturated anything people can think of that they want.” When I read this, I chuckled. Clearly, Mr. Elon Musk has never been inside my head!

Take Afrogoth for example, a fashion movement for curious, playful, global citizens who love the stories and histories that clothes tell. How many Kenyan stories and histories can be told just from the Berlin Conference of 1884, to the year 1984? How many East African stories? African? African diaspora? The fashion industry aspires to become more ecofriendly. How many new ecofriendly fashion inputs can be produced by AI and Robots?

Musk bought Twitter/X, which was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, who in 2011, gave a talk at Stanford University titled "The Power of Curiosity and Inspiration". (It so happens that a significant number of the Paypal Mafia members attended Stanford University). More recently, Jack Dorsey, now CEO of Block, shared his insightful and inspiring thoughts in a video titled "Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI". (It so happens that the other person being interviewed in that video is another member of the Paypal Mafia, Roelof Botha, former Paypal CFO and currently a Sequoia partner and Block board member.) The video begins with a snippet of Dorsey's confession: "Since last year, I've just had this existential dread and also hope and optimism in the same thought process of, what is even a company going forward, what are these structures going forward and this is the only durable one structure that I could actually imagine lasting for quite some time and it was coming from a place of like, wow, is our company just going to be completely irrelevant..."

It is interesting to compare Dorsey's 2011 thoughts with his 2026 thoughts. In his 2011 Stanford University talk (minute 28 to 29), he said: "I'm effectively just the chief editor of the company. As an editor, I'm constantly taking all of these inputs and deciding on that one or that intersection of a few that make sense for what we're doing. And there's three access points that I pay attention to in particular. Number one is the team. We have to bring the best people in, edit the best people in so we have a good cast of characters and edit away any negative elements...always minding that team dynamic because at the end of the day we're just a group of people working on one single goal. And if we can't step in a cohesive, coordinated fashion, then we're going to trip all over the place. And that's a messy company and no one wants to use that."

Let me pause here and recall my article "AI Agents, Beacraft and Building Worlds, Cinema Couture". As a storyteller who loves to read/watch and write character-driven stories, I wholeheartedly agree with 2011 Dorsey. Characters - the employees (and I would add, the suppliers and right customers) -  are key and I suppose in this A.I. era, the right A.I. agents are key and the way to get the right A.I. agents is to ensure that the values behind (underneath?) the A.I. agents are correct.

In the RECONCILIATION framework, the first C stands for Candid and the second C stands for Communication. 2011 Dorsey goes on to say (minute 29): "Number two is internal and external communication. Internal communication is just the coordination around what we're doing and why we're doing it and what our goals are and why the goals are like that. That's it. If you have that sort of highlevel, this is where we're going, this is the vision, this is the next 30 days and three months and six months and a year maybe, it makes it very easy to set priorities and for all the edges of the company to set their own priorities to do the right thing and the external communication is the product, the product is the story we're telling the world and we want to put everything through this, we don't want it to be about a person. We want it to be about how people are using it and how people are fitting it into their lives and what they're doing with it. That's the strongest story we have."

2026 Dorsey, when asked what he thinks about what's wrong with the way normal companies work, in terms of hierarchies, mentioned communication (minute 3 to 4): "it's recognizing what do we see in the pattern, what is the function of the hierarchy...what we wanted to explore is where does it actually come from, why does it exist in the first place and if you look at it from first principles it's all about information flow to a broad base of people, so being able to communicate over a breath of people and have that be manageable at a human scale. So, we've gotten into structures that we've borrowed and iterated on a little bit over 2,000 years and now we're facing this I think completely foundational moment in being able to question every element of how we work. And the one that I think is questioned the least is probably the hierarchy and probably about how we manage communication flow around the companies."

In "Exploring Code Gavel's Web3 Founder's Checklist" I wrote that currently, I am playing all the four main roles in Afrogoth: vision weaver (Chief storyteller), system navigator (strategist including A.I. strategy), community organizer (mobilizing people and resources) and healer/bridge builder (confronting history, creating bridges between cultures). 2026 Dorsey said (minute 8 to 9): "We want to normalize down to just three roles. The first is an IC, which is a builder or an operator. this is a salesperson, it's an engineer, it's a designer,  a product person...they're actually working with the tools to build or to operate the company, they're augmented because they have access to agents...one person can, you know, potentially do the work or explore the breath that would take a team or 10 people to do in the past. And I think there's a durable human skill that lasts there, which is judgment and taste and creativity. (In AI Agents, Beacraft and Building Worlds, Cinema Couture, I mentioned Beacraft's question: "how do you articulate what good taste is?" then went on to outline what good taste is for Afrogoth, based on the Reconciliation Framewok.)

The second role that 2026 Dorsey mentions is (minute 9): "...the DRRi and that's someone who can own the customer outcomes. They're putting a strategy together. They're understanding what roadmap allows us to solve customer needs and and problems and they're assembling a team of these IC's to get something done...the durable human skill there is ownership and accountability...they're really owning the the outcomes and whether something is failing or not." Again, the RECONCILIATION framework helps with this: Respect, Empathy, Candid, Optimism, "No", Communication, Integrity, Leadership, Acknowledge, Trust, Non-Negotiables.

Dorsey mentions empathy in relation to the third role: "... the last role would be what we consider managers today which we're calling a player coach. This is someone who is building the capability and the capacity of other humans and their craft, but instead of telling them how to do it, they're showing them how to do it by doing the work. So, these are these are people who might be IC's or they might be DRI, but they're also really good at a coaching skill to help the people around them get better and master their craft. And today that's a management structure where IC's and even DRI report to a player coach but I think in the future it's an assignment. It's not a reporting structure but I'm assigned to IC's to help them master their craft. And obviously the durable human skill there is building human capacity and coaching and there's a lot of empathy there and all the soft skills that...great managers are are known for."

I was delighted to find out that acronymns don't bother Botha (Sorry!). When asked about the timeless qualities of CEO and what is new, Botha said (around minute 56): "I like acronyms. So I came up with one which is A.L.E...Authenticity, Logic and Empathy."