Steven Li

AI is making CEOs delusional

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5 Ivy League applications 100 job applications 4 YC applications All rejections, not even an interview. Never had a job. 6+ years of selling vapes, driving DoorDash, tutoring, and taking tests for other students. I watched as students with 1/100th of my drive were handed opportunities because they could play the part. Quietly built skills and accumulated knowledge. No recognition or feedback from anybody. Until it finally paid off. The entire system is rigged against the misfits. Use it as fuel.

A guy who's built companies for 25 years just went on Diary of a CEO and said plumbers will earn more than lawyers within the next 2 years. Sounds insane. But the numbers actually back it up: Last week alone, $280 BILLION was wiped off the value of legal and data companies. Thomson Reuters crashed. LegalZoom got hammered. The entire knowledge economy felt the shockwave in real time. Why? Because AI just proved it can do what a $500/hour lawyer does for $20 a month. Daniel Priestley went on the show and explained how he recently had a legal case that was quoted at $60,000 by a law firm. Instead of paying, his team used Claude. The AI gave them a full coaching session on how to handle the case, mapped out multiple decision tree pathways, generated every document they needed, and even built a spreadsheet breaking down exactly what to say and what not to say in the negotiation. Total cost: $20 a month. They resolved the case without a lawyer. Now multiply that by every business in the world that's paying legal fees they no longer need to pay. The entire financial model of knowledge work is collapsing in real time. Meanwhile, ask yourself this: Can AI fix your toilet? Can it rewire your house? Lay your foundation? Replace your roof? It can't. And it won't be able to for decades. Here's where the supply and demand crisis gets ugly... Governments spent 20 years pushing every young person into university. Get a degree or you'll never get a job. So an entire generation that should've become plumbers, electricians, and builders went and got master's degrees in subjects nobody was hiring for. They came out with $60-80K in debt and ZERO marketable skills. That created a massive shortage of tradespeople. And now AI is about to flood the market with unemployed knowledge workers while the demand for people who work with their hands explodes. The math is simple: Too many lawyers, not enough plumbers. AI makes the lawyer surplus worse every single month. Priestley called this the most important economic shift of our LIFETIME. For 30 years, blue collar work has been devalued. Everyone wanted to sit behind a screen. White collar was the "smart" path. That era just ended. The pendulum is swinging back hard. And the people who positioned themselves in physical, hands-on work that AI cannot touch are about to be the highest earners in the economy. For anyone building a business right now, the lesson is clear: Stop chasing what's "prestigious." Chase what's SCARCE. AI can write your contracts, build your website, run your ads, and draft your emails. But it cannot show up to your client's office, shake their hand, and solve a physical problem. The winners of the next decade won't be the most technically skilled. They'll be the ones who bet on what machines can't do.

Me reviewing the code written by Claude before pushing it to production

Your cofounder won't leave, of course, no chance. But other people's cofounders - they have wandering eyes. About 25%-28% of 2-founder teams lose one of those cofounders by year 4. Get that cofounder prenup (vesting schedules) in place!