What is the top skill every business owner and organization needs in order to thrive in the AI era?

Easy. Communication.

But don’t get me wrong: I don’t just mean communication in the way that thousands of soft-skills communication coaches have been talking about for the last 100 years.

I don’t mean communication in the sense of “you don’t need to learn the hard stuff because soft skills are all that matter.”

What I’m talking about is a very specific kind of entirely new form of communication.

Yes, the ability to think and speak clearly is, was, and always will be a must-have human skill.

But now? It’s not just about convincing other people and getting your message across to humans.

The new skill is about changing the architecture of how we structure arguments inside our brain to be the most effective at getting things done in the world of computers.

While charm, panache, and a way with language are great in the human world, you’re not going to charm your way to better results with AI.

Case in point: I called Claude m’lady and it banned me for 5 hours! Kidding.

In addition to traditional communication skills, one must now have a profound mastery of logical thinking as it relates to solving complex problems. The new skill I’m describing is the ability to express one’s self flawlessly while being able to comprehend how larger problems are broken down into byte-sized chunks. This is the skill that will serve every human well for the foreseeable future.

But to say “great communication is all that matters” is not a free pass to avoid the hard work of learning and engaging with new technologies. It’s not an excuse to learn nothing and pretend that we don’t need to learn anything because we’ve known everything all along.

Rather, this moment is a call to action to learn how to think and communicate in a new way that most humans never have before.

This is the actual tag line on Supabase's website today, one of the leading database providers for AI coders.

This is the dream that they are (successfully) selling. But is it true?

There are two sides to this: Like NFTs, crypto, and meme stocks during COVID, there is no shortage of people looking for a quick, effortless buck.

Right now, it’s safe to assume that everyone can build something in a weekend with AI.

Most people can even build something that looks impressive/halfway decent.

But aside from looking good, it’s unlikely there’s much depth there, let alone enough depth to actually scale to millions. It’s no different than saying “grab our pickaxe, strike it rich from the gold pouring out of these mountains!”

Maybe ONE person will win that lottery, but it’s exceedingly rare.

The truth? Most people are too lazy to get anything meaningful from software, even with AI help.

Most people will code feverishly for a weekend and then drop it like a New Year’s Resolution.

To build something meaningful takes consistency and patience. Two human traits that are always in short supply.

There's a reason 90% of startups blow through their marketing budget and get nowhere.

Helping brands go public and also raise tens of millions of dollars and do hundreds of millions in revenue, one of the questions I get asked the most is how to spend (marketing) budget at each phase of company growth.

What I find is that typical companies want to build additions to their house before they’ve built a house. They want to build a skylight before they’ve poured concrete in a foundation. It’s easy to get ahead of ourselves…

It doesn’t make sense to throw ad spend on a company with no brand and no consistent messaging.

It doesn’t make sense to start with SEO in a deep tech environment, where the world doesn’t even know what it is you’re offering yet. People don’t search for new technology the way they search for “discount dentists near me”.

The way I’ve helped so many start-ups and scale-ups get to the next level is by ruthlessly focusing on sequencing. Yes, some day, you will want to do everything. But today? You need to get your branding, your messaging, and your assets right. Without those things, you can blow through your budget and get nowhere.

There’s a reason unicorn start-ups all tend to work in a certain way. And that way is almost always: brand first.

Your brand is either a liability or an asset that will pay dividends for years to come.

The order matters.

A friend told me coding now feels like shaping clay on a pottery wheel. I haven't been able to stop thinking about what that means.

Computers: Cold, sterile, lifeless, inside-the-box, boring.

Real life: Flowing, messy, organic, unpredictable.

In computer land of the past, programs were traditionally made by thinking through problems in a highly mathematical, organized, and rigid way.

The way living organisms evolve is very different. For example: Why do humans have sinuses that drain from the top of our nasal cavity instead of the bottom? It only makes sense if we see how we evolved from creatures who didn’t walk upright. How many of our terrible colds would have been alleviated if we could just design ourselves the way we engineer software?

But now that’s changed.

Gone are the days of thinking through an app from start to finish and coding it according to a plan. One friend of mine said coding now is more like shaping clay on a pottery wheel. The code is ever-evolving in front of our eyes, and it’s our job to shape the clay as it spins.

As we all build the software tools that will define the next 10 years of our personal lives and careers, we’ll be continually molding the software programs that govern our lives. We’ll watch them grow, improve, and change just like a living organism.

We don’t know where the organisms we make today will end up in a couple of years, but we know that, like living objects, they will be flowing, messy, organic, and unpredictable.

For the rigid thinkers, this is bad news. But for those who’ve wanted a taste of the power programmers have always had without becoming inside-the-box and boring, it’s an incredible time.

If AI can do everything all at once, why have I had to code with it 7 days a week for the last 6 months?

What I’ve learned is: Even with AI, it still takes an enormous amount of time to work through complex problems.

Yes, not writing the code saves us time on a certain kind of problem, but we are a long way from AI doing everything for us—even in software.

As our (coding) projects grow, the number of decisions we need to make also grows. It’s exponential.

What makes your app yours are the thousands of tiny decisions you’ve made daily over a period of months.

There’s no foreseeable reality where agentic AI will just go off and build what you want without you guiding it in a meaningful way.

Unless what you want is so basic, so generic, and so commodified that there was no point in you building it in the first place.