Bye Bye Junior Hires

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Niclas Schlopsna on what founders don’t know about large VC economics (Link)

• Michal Bukovy on why fundraising should be the last thing you do (Link)

• Muadh Dliaa on running if an investor asks about traction in pre-seed (Link)

• Peter Walker shares end of year founder fundraising data (Link)

Growth

• Ernesto Lopez on his exact process to take apps from $0 to $10k/month (Link)

ICYMI

• Unlock global growth with Justworks EOR (Link)*

• Rohit Mittal on the 3 stuck founder archetypes (Link)

• Justin Mazeka Vogt shares a simple starter matrix for delegation (Link)

• Justin Mateen on why the first mover isn’t always the best bet (Link)

• Jasiel Martin-Odoom shares a founder tip about investor intros (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Brand Consistency Checker

People have subjective judgement.

And mistakes happen.

Especially as teams and orgs grow.

Do big or even mid-sized companies really even have a consistent brand voice across all of their surfaces?

Of course, they have consistent brand guidelines… but how can you be sure those guidelines are being followed in the same way all the time?

Is each marketing manager interpreting them the same way?

Probably, realistically, not.

It’s not a problem any one person or simple system can solve.

But LLMs could.

Imagine an arbiter that you feed your brand guidelines into, and then it integrates with your creative tools (Canva, Figma, etc) and also your customer-facing surface tools (social media schedulers, email comms, etc) to validate if something is on brand or not (and how to fix it if not).

It would both increase consistency and also reduce the need for human reviews, directly saving time and money that could be more easily mapped to the P&L.

If I were building this, I’d start with social — that’s where mistakes are most costly.

🧠 Framework: BRIDGeS Framework

This might be the most fully built-out framework I’ve ever shared.

It even has its own official FigJam file?

It’s a decision-making framework that’s highly structured, which makes it particularly useful for complex or ambiguous problems that involve a variety of stakeholders.

Their official descriptions are a little buzzwordy but TLDR:

It breaks decisions down into a problem space and a solution space.

In the problem space, you’re exploring Benefits, Risks, Issues, Dependencies, Goals, and the effects on the Subjects who will be impacted.

Start by identifying the Subjects and then filling in the other areas in relation to them.

Once you’ve explored that, you enter the solution space where you run through three steps in order:

1. Solution Variations → These are the different high-level approaches you can take to achieve the Benefits and Goals (ex. building something in-house vs partnering with someone else).

2. Decompose Your Solution → After you’ve chosen a solution, break it down into large chunks for teams to work on. Typically, each chunk should be tied to a specific hypothesis you’re testing.

3. Roadmap → Now we’re in familiar territory — you’re just building your task-level product and operational roadmap.

There’s a lot going on here, so I’d only say to break this one out for large problems on large teams, but it’s worth keeping in your back pocket.

📈 Trend: Fewer Junior Hires

Remember that chart that showed the pandemic-era rise and subsequent fall in job listings for software engineering jobs?

It was everywhere.

Many people attributed the fall, at least partially, to the rise of LLMs and extrapolated that it was likely mostly junior roles (which make up the bulk of job listings) being impacted.

Turns out that was exactly right.

When we look at actual employment data, we can see that the job listing trend is matched by actual jobs.

And, in fact, senior roles have continued to increase at roughly the same indexed rate as they have since at least 2015. Maybe slightly slower.

It’s very clear that it’s becoming harder to break into existing companies in your early career years.

What does this imply?

I think it’s another datapoint in favor of something we’ve been talking about for well over a year — a forthcoming massive rise in micro-entrepreneurship.

The rise of the Silicon Valley Small Business.

More talented people going their own way. More variety in products and offerings available.

If you have friends who are AI doomers and say it will make us unemployed and purposeless (when it comes to work, at least), use this to reframe the conversation.

The new AI-powered economy will be very different, but we’re not all going to be sitting around. In some ways, we’ll actually have more on our shoulders.

💬 Quote: Launch It Anyway

This tweet is pretty simple, which made me sit here and wonder what to write about it.

Ironic.

I talk a lot about the importance of action, and motion, to help you make progress.

Every time I do, I get a response from someone saying it was just what they needed to hear.

So, today, let’s keep it simple.

If you’ve been waiting on something, stop waiting.

If you haven’t launched yet, launch.

It it’s not ready, it’s ok.

No one remembers.

You’ll launch again.

Just get it in front of people.

See what they notice.

See what they don’t care about.

It might surprise you.

Failing now might save you time later.

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