Ian Keen

Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation. Approaching $10M annual run rate. One Founder + AI. Zero employees. Polsia runs companies autonomously. It also ran its own fundraising. I just showed up for signatures.

HR: We lost another senior employee today. CEO: What happened? HR: He resigned after receiving an external offer. CEO: That makes no sense. We could have matched it. HR: That is the issue. We were willing to pay a stranger 70% more for the same role, but would not give our existing employee even a 20% raise. CEO: External hiring is different. That is market pricing. HR: He noticed that too. CEO: We appreciated his loyalty. He had been here for years. HR: Yes. And during those years, he consistently exceeded expectations while being told to “wait for the next review cycle.” CEO: But budgets are complicated for internal employees. HR: Apparently not for external candidates. The new hire budget was approved in three days. His raise request sat for eight months. CEO: We had to stay competitive in the hiring market. HR: He was part of that same market. The only difference is that another company valued him before we did. CEO: So he left over salary? HR: Not just salary. He left because he realized loyalty was being rewarded less than leaving. CEO: That is unfortunate. HR: Yes. Companies will sometimes trust a candidate after a 45-minute interview more than an employee who already proved themselves for five years. CEO: So what are you saying? HR: If companies only recognize employee value after a resignation letter appears, then eventually employees will stop waiting to be appreciated internally. Sometimes the fastest way for an employee to get market value is to stop being your employee.

It’s 2018 and your coworker just sent you a 400 line pull request. You get a cup of coffee and sit down to review it. It’s beautiful. Elegant micro-refactors. Crispy method names. You catch a few things, but that’s ok. It’s part of the dance. They didn’t consider extensibility on part of their API. Here’s a comment buddy. They respond in an hour saying they think we should do one piece differently than your comment. Hey let’s jump into a room and figure it out. We can’t just agree to disagree, this code is too important. The PR merges and goes to prod. You feel a shared sense of ownership and accomplishment. That night you go to sleep and dream of that code. You can still see the shapes of it on the backs of your eyelids, your IDE syntax highlighting sparking neurons in your reptile brain. You go to work the next day ready to go. You understand the system. N is your foundation. Time to build n+1.

big "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" energy. the original DOOM impl is ~40k lines of C and a bit of assembly and is also a full software renderer.

There has never been a single good software engineer laid off because of AI, maybe not a single employee in general

To the non-technical teams shipping production code. I'm sorry, your code is shit, it might look like it's ok but it's bad. You don't know how to ask it to be good. You have way to much trust in something you know nothing about. You will leak data Please get a technical person to use the AI.