Pranav

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Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why. First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it. Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands. Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition. I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively. THE 100X ORGANIZATION The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago. Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken. The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems. These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now. The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working. THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS — THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality. Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment. AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down. Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed. So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code? And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time? If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code. The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x. The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated. I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already. More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well. — THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS Product management and design roles are merging. Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers. And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers. The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results. The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy. Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on. To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production. Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck. That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time. — THE SYSTEM MANAGERS Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp. The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world. You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is. — THE FRONT-LINERS In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers. This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings. One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers. REWARDING 100X IMPACT In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go? In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it. We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them. You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace. Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems. THE FUTURE Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next. The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago. ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

🇯🇵A Japanese developer built an app that puts a fat cat on your screen and forces you to take a break Silicon Valley spent billions on wellness platforms, mindfulness subscriptions, and digital detox retreats A guy in Japan said: fat cat, problem solved

Open letter to Indians in America. -- Dear brothers and sisters from Bharat: Like I did 37 years ago, you arrived in America with no money but with a good education and cultural heritage from Bharat. You achieved outstanding success. America was good to us. For that we must remain grateful - gratitude is our Bharatiya way. Yet today, a significant number of Americans, may be not the majority but not too far from it either, believe that Indians "take away" American jobs and our success in America was unfairly earned. You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself. That is the "hard right" vs "woke left" battle. You are mere bystanders to that conflict. Meanwhile there is one thing that is true now and will be true in the future: the respect Indians command world-wide will substantially depend on the fortunes of India herself. If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn ("hellhole") and we must not confuse either with respect. Respect in today's world, along with prosperity and security, comes from one source: a nation's technological prowess. India produces sufficient brain power to achieve that prowess but alas we exported so much of that talent, particularly to America. As we develop that prowess in India, our civilisational strength will assert itself. As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent. Our vast youthful population needs the technology leadership you gained over the years to guide them towards prosperity. Let's do it with a missionary zeal. Respectfully Sridhar Vembu

China just made Silicon Valley's entire AI industry look like a scam. The US government spent 3 years trying to stop China from building competitive AI. But this backfired HORRIBLY. Here's what happened: Yesterday, a Chinese startup called DeepSeek released a new AI model called V4. It matches the performance of OpenAI and Anthropic's best models. At 1/7th the price. And for the first time ever, it was built on Chinese chips. NOT American ones. That last part is the one that terrifies the west. For context: Since 2022, the US has banned the export of advanced AI chips to China. The entire strategy was built on the assumption that if China can't access Nvidia's best hardware, they can't build frontier AI. But DeepSeek just proved that assumption wrong. Their V4 model was trained and runs on Huawei's Ascend chips. Huawei spent months working directly with DeepSeek to make sure V4 runs across their entire line of AI processors. Jensen Huang even predicted this on a recent podcast: "The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation." That day was yesterday. And the numbers are crazy: DeepSeek V4 costs $3.48 per million output tokens. OpenAI's latest model GPT-5.5 costs $30. Anthropic's Claude charges $25. Same ballpark performance. 7x cheaper. Uber's CTO just admitted they burned through their ENTIRE 2026 AI budget in 4 months using Anthropic's tools. If Uber had used DeepSeek instead, that same budget would have lasted 7 YEARS. 4 months vs 7 years. Same work getting done. But the pricing isn't even the big thing here. The real story is what DeepSeek did with their technical report: They published the benchmarks where they LOSE. Every AI company cherry-picks the tests where their model wins. DeepSeek ran the full comparison against GPT-5.4 and Google's Gemini, found they trail frontier models by 3 to 6 months, and printed it anyway. They literally don't care because the price gap makes the performance gap irrelevant for 90% of use cases. So the US export controls didn't slow China down. They ACCELERATED China's independence. Because Chinese developers were FORCED to train models with limited resources, they had to figure out how to make AI radically more efficient. That constraint became their competitive advantage. Every generation of DeepSeek has gotten dramatically cheaper to train. V4 continues the trend. Meanwhile US companies are going the OPPOSITE direction: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro costs $180 per million output tokens. That's 51x more expensive than DeepSeek V4 for comparable work. The Commerce Secretary confirmed this week that ZERO Nvidia advanced chip shipments have actually gone through to China despite being approved in January. So China built frontier AI anyway. Without American chips. At a fraction of the cost. And the market response tells you everything: Chinese chipmaker SMIC surged 10%. Huahong Semiconductor jumped 15%. DeepSeek's Chinese AI competitors Zhipu AI and MiniMax dropped 9% because V4 is destroying them too. DeepSeek is making Silicon Valley's pricing model look like a scam. US tech companies spent $650 billion on AI infrastructure this year. DeepSeek just showed the world you can match their output for pennies. The export controls were supposed to be America's ace card. Instead they taught China how to win without American chips, at American prices nobody can compete with. Jensen Huang was right. This is a horrible outcome. But it's the outcome America built for itself.

The market sold oil on a tweet. The trade isn’t “sell the news.” The trade is: there is no news yet

The Jensen Huang episode. 0:00:00 – Is Nvidia’s biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains? 0:16:25 – Will TPUs break Nvidia’s hold on AI compute? 0:41:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia become a hyperscaler? 0:57:36 – Should we be selling AI chips to China? 1:35:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!

🤯BREAKING: Researchers just mathematically proved that AI layoffs will collapse the economy: and every CEO already knows it. The AI Layoff Trap. A game theory paper from UPenn + Boston University is glaringly important! 100K+ tech layoffs in 2025. 80% of US workers exposed. And no market force can stop it. → Every company fires workers to cut costs → Every fired worker stops buying products → Revenue collapses across every sector → The companies that fired everyone go bankrupt It's a Prisoner's Dilemma with math behind it. Automate and you survive short-term. Don't automate and your competitor kills you. But everyone automating destroys the demand that makes all companies viable. UBI (universal basic income) won't fix it. Profit taxes won't fix it. The researchers found only one solution: a Pigouvian automation tax "robot tax" The AI trap on the economy is here!

This isn’t just a $META issue. It’s increasingly an issue for all of Tech. Because even within Tech, there is an emerging divide between AI-superpowered engineer/PM/sales folks and everyone else. And we know how that will end: Smaller orgs, bigger payoffs but then the riches distributed across even fewer players that it is today. And everyone sees it coming. Hence the rot from the outside and, now, the inside. To my peers and to the super entrepreneurs who are far more successful than me: This is why elites in tech that “have made it” are increasingly the ones that EVERYONE hates. We’ve not distinguished the difference between luck and skill that got us here. We don’t act as stewards in the broadest sense of the term. We aren’t bringing society along like other generations of super successful business people have. We don’t pay it forward in any meaningful way - although we have clever ways to make it look like we do. Mostly, people see us hording all the gains. Modern technology companies have essentially created a new form of indentured servitude for the educated masses where SBC was used to pay you an incredible living wage so you don’t go work “for the other guy”. But what does it mean to make $500k/yr if you still leak 55% to taxes then your landlord takes the next 25% for rent?? You still can’t buy a house in SV. These folks are on an eternal hamster wheel. It turns out it’s not much different than being in middle America making $55k.

An Army whistleblower claims he once visited a secret civilization on the Moon. He says its inhabitants travel in egg shaped UFOs and that he personally flew in one. He also alleges the deep state possesses Stargate technology capable of teleporting both people and spacecraft. “There’s people living in the Moon.” “There are multiple Moon bases.”

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️