00:42:42 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:42:42] S1: Yeah. When I think about what my kids will be astonished that I do today, which is the equivalent of my mom showing me the maps that she used to keep in her car back in the 90s or something like this. I think a lot of that will come in reflecting on how people spend their time, like their working hours today. And in the future, very large proportions of the work that even executives, ICs, managers, kind of everywhere up and down the pyramid spend their time on will be abstracted away and almost delegated to AI in a lot of ways. And so things that are routine, say I do this workflow once, I think, you know, we could say, were you actually doing on your computer on the days of Delphi? Say, okay, was copying code from here to there, or I would do outbound and I would go all over LinkedIn and spam these things. And those are what I was spending my hours on. I think they'll say, wait, what? Like you didn't have someone do that for you? It's like, well, no, like it costs a lot of money to hire someone to do something for me. And they'll say, oh, because they would just imagine that I would be kind of delegating these processes and workflows to software. And I think it'll be a crazy thing to kids that people were doing large sections of the workflows that they do today in fifteen years. [00:43:58] S0: Yeah, I almost had this vision of every human will have an AI companion who essentially will do their bidding on anything that's routine. [00:44:09] S1: AI Jarvis, right?
00:44:09 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:44:09] S1: AI Jarvis, right? [00:44:10] S0: Yeah, AI Jarvis and that will allow us to sort of shift our focus from all of these things that we were burning energy into something that I think using your language could be potentially very powerful and very good quest like. Now I think being a career podcast, the natural question is, how does this then impact those that are starting their career or in mid career? That statement can be empowering, and that statement can be quite scary. And I'm curious as to what's your career guidance for those that are in mid career and they're worried about what AI might do for them. You know, there are certainly things that can help, but then there's people that might be fearful of what this could mean career wise. What's your take on that?
00:44:57 · Markie Wagner
[00:44:57] S1: My guess is that we will become orchestrators of new forms of capital and leverage that are very AI driven. So we might have AI specialists. We might have AI interns. Know, whatever you want to call it. It's kind of behind the scenes AI workflow fabric that can use applications and take actions on our behalf that we direct. And so you become an orchestrator. And of course, you're also doing maybe some IC work, but that will probably trend away over time. Rather than writing code to do code reviews. Or rather than sending the outbound, you review the outbound, but respond back or something like this to that effect. And so I think in a lot of ways you effectively end up moving up the management letter, but you're managing AI resources in a lot of way. And so I think more so than ever before, getting the experience and doing something yourself before you delegate, it's very important. So obviously doing the IC work today, but also doing so much IC work that you then end up scaling through the ladder and end up managing, I think human resources could be helpful, ended up understanding how to communicate things that you want done and kind of learn how to be an orchestrator of human capital today. We'll probably have lots of transferable learnings to managing AI capital in the future. And so I think that might be an important story. But you can't just say, oh, I want to be a manager, so I'm going to start managing before I even know how to do the work. I don't think a shortcut is the answer here either. Learn how to do the work, Learn how to do all the types of work in your part of the org before you then transition to that next layer.
00:46:31 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:46:31] S0: Yeah. I love that. And I think that's a lot of the focus of this podcast is to not focus on how to execute the work, but the soft skills needed to get the most out of one's career and the peers and the folks and the resources that you have associated with you. Maybe as we kind of round out the today's episode, I think a lot of listeners hear your story, hear how connected you are with the work and how long term focused you are. But I think there's a lot of excitement around the career journey that you've already had. And my sense is the natural question is how does one get a career like Markie? What do I do to be more like her? And I'm curious as to... I'm sure you've given this advice to many people given how inspiring you are. What's the secret to your success? What's your career story that you might be able to sort of suggest to others that they can maybe steal from to accelerate their own journey?
00:47:39 · Markie Wagner
[00:47:39] S1: I don't know if there's a secret. I do think that there are personal attributes that have led to me ending up where I have today. I think the first one is being honest with myself in terms of judgment about the types of work that I spend time on. I'm not the type of person to make up excuses about why something that really is boring that I'm working on is actually cool. I think a lot of people will do that and almost make up reasons why a bad quest is good to get themselves out of bed. But I think those people also often end up in cases where they feel unmotivated. They don't really care about their work. Like, oh, but this work is so important. Why am I unmotivated? I think your brain knows when what you're doing every day is important and not. And so I think for me, a lot of the energy that I've had around the work that I've done has come from picking good quests and being brutally honest and listening to my taste, like what is worth spending time on and not spending time on. It's very hard to motivate me to do things that I don't find interesting, extremely difficult. So I had no choice but to do work that I thought was interesting.
00:48:48 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:48:48] S0: Yeah. That's the first one. So it sounds like judgment, picking the right things and making sure that you're in it early so that you can see around corners maybe a bit before others see it is sort of one thing that I'm hearing in your story. But I'm also hearing some characteristic personality characteristics that allow you to separate yourself from maybe others that maybe have the right thought. We all know people that are pretty thoughtful about things that matter, that they see trends that are happening, but they don't always punch through like you. [00:49:28] S1: Probably the next trait would be I'm a very gritty person. Once I lock onto something, it's very hard to get myself to look away until it kind of comes to fruition and to conclusion. So I think that was another core trait. A lot of the stories and kind of chronicles of elementary, middle, high school is like when everybody else had said, oh man, that would be so cool, but it was too hard or how would I go and spend time on that? I just got very unhinged about the thing and did whatever it took to get it over the line.