The Billionaire Isn't Vibe Coding All Day

0:00straight. How much AI are you using? God, this is a really good question. Okay. So, I'm going to answer this question in two parts. So, one is how much is ACQ using and then how much am I personally using? So, I I'm going to answer your question with a story that might be relevant for you. So, I just made a video about this cuz it's been really top of mind, which is that I had a conversation um last week with a friend of mine who's a billionaire and little older, um really awesome dude, phenomenal entrepreneur.

0:27And I asked him, I said, "Hey, you know, off the cameras." I said, "I know that publicly you got to say you're, you know, everything's AI, etc." I said, "But how much AI are you using?" He started laughing. He's like, "Well, I mean, I'm not vibe coding all day, right?" And so, the idea is this is that what AI did not do is it did not erase every other form of leverage. I'm going to say this again. Just because AI got invented does not mean all other forms of leverage stopped existing.

0:54For example, if I build a big brand, AI does not stop that from existing. If I have a lot of money and I can deploy a capital, it doesn't mean that AI stopped that from existing. AI gave people who had no capital a high-leverage tool that they can use to get significantly more for what they put in. And the more skilled you are with it, the more you get out of it. And so, but if I have, let's say, let's just let's imagine something for a second. Let's say that you spent your entire life learning how to do AI in this first specific use case.

1:22If I say, "Hey, man, um I'll pay you $5 million a year to do that thing." If you don't have $5 million a year and there's no one else offering you $5 million a year, I can gain access to all of that skill into my own business without learning AI because I use a different form of leverage. And so, what I'm seeing a lot right now is many people are still missing the fundamentals of business and using AI to try and make up for it. But let me make Let me Let me make this make sense.

1:48If right now you're deploying AI really aggressively in your business or in your startup or your side hustle or whatever and you're not making more money, it means you are still not working on the constraint. We still have to allocate our resources, even with more leverage to the constraint. And so what's happened is that people have more capacity to work, but they are still now deploying that capacity against things that do not matter. And so just because you automated your email, doesn't mean that you're all of a sudden going to start making more money.

2:12It just means you automated your email reading. Congratulations. Right? And so the fundamentals are still there. We just have another tool in our arsenal in terms of leverage. Now, in the future is there a world where it's all robots? Maybe, I don't know. We're not there yet. Now, in terms of how much I use it, I use it on the repetitive tasks I like I basically automated almost all the repetitive tasks in my day, but that doesn't take very long for me to do. What is more difficult for me to automate is the relationships that I have. Um the decisions around allocations of capital. Now, you could say, "Okay, well, I'm going to spin up a deep research agent." But the thing is is anyone who's used AI for an extended period of time, like the decision-making that AI does, like you can pretty much sway the decision A based on the data that you give it, but also based on your um whatever direction it thinks you're leaning towards, it will typically confirm. So, it'll I think it'll agree with you like 49% more than a normal human would be given the same exact information. And so, if you're trying to make strategic decisions using AI, I have not found it to be very good at all. And especially since you're not making huge amounts of strategic decisions in the business, I would say that you don't want to forget how to use your brain. Because at the end of the day, once AI is against AI, the thing that What is the differentiator if both people are using AI? Well, the person who's actually managing it, right? And so, what are we compensated in proportion to? I said it earlier, the risk we're willing to take on. And so, what can AI not do today? It cannot take risk. Somebody has to own the responsibility of the outcome. And so, the more you can do that deploying all other forms of leverage, the more you can scale. I'll give you one more example of this.

3:35So, leverage has a lot of different forms, right? I talked about media, software is obviously a version of that, there's capital, money is a version of that, getting other people to work for you is another version of that. But let me give you like five rapid-fire ones. If I go from having a 101 business to servicing people 1 on 10, I just gained 10x leverage. There's not a lot of AI stuff that you can decide like that and get 10 x leverage on. If I decide that I'm going to not make everything bespoke, I'm going to go to a specific customer avatar and then make more templated solutions like that, I get significantly more leverage. I might get 3 x 5 x leverage on my delivery, right? If I go from selling one on one to selling one to many, I might have virtually infinite leverage on my conversion. And so we have to make sure that the AI is being deployed in a place that is the constraint, yet again. Right? And so great, you've AI'd your whole business.

4:16Guess what? No one knows you exist. And so the problems of business still remain. Now, of the activities that you need to do to get people to know you exist, of course, there's things that we can use AI. We're very heavy in terms of using AI across acquisition.com, um how we make ads, how we make content. And so what's that allowed us to do right now, transparently, is that we're still a hiring people. And to give a little bit of a proof point around this, look up how many employees OpenAI has.

4:40Look up how many employees Claude has or Anthropic has. Thousands. And so if people were not necessary, you'd think that the number one most frontier models in the world wouldn't have any. They are necessary. And if you look at jobs markets, in the companies that have have used AI or adopted AI the most, they're hiring more than other companies. And so in the short term, um I wouldn't be as afraid of it as I think a lot of people are. I think it is creating more jobs and um than people were afraid of that it was going to. Um and I think as always, people are still making stupid decisions and using AI to do stupid things very fast. If you're business owner and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it.

5:48And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.