Find a good company, work hard, build experience, get promoted, make more money and hopefully accumulate some equity along the way. There was always risk involved, but the general belief was that if you performed well and joined a strong company, you could build some level of security.
The employment market has changed
Look at what has happened across technology over the last several years. Large companies hire aggressively, reorganize, lay people off, change direction and then start hiring again. Sometimes all of that happens within the same year. And these are not always struggling companies trying to survive. Plenty of very profitable companies have made large layoffs simply because priorities changed, growth slowed or leadership decided the organization needed to become more efficient.
That is business, and companies have every right to make those decisions. But employees are paying attention too.
People are becoming much more cautious about giving everything they have to an employer when they know the relationship can change overnight. I have talked to plenty of candidates who are not just tired of looking for jobs. They are tired of the entire cycle. Apply, interview five or six times, negotiate an offer, start over at a new company, prove yourself again, survive a reorganization and hope you are still there long enough for the equity you were promised to actually vest.
Then potentially do the whole thing again two years later.
That wears people down, particularly experienced people who have already been through the cycle several times.
So maybe the new job is you
This is why I think we are going to see a major increase in solo entrepreneurs over the next several years. And when I say entrepreneur, I do not necessarily mean someone raising venture capital, hiring 50 employees and trying to build the next billion dollar startup.
I am talking about something much simpler: one smart person with experience, a laptop, AI, some inexpensive software and a problem they understand well enough to solve.
An engineer can build a product today without immediately needing an engineering department. A marketer can create a specialized agency. A recruiter can build a niche search firm. A product executive can become a fractional leader or consultant. Someone who has spent 15 years inside an industry probably knows dozens of problems that companies would happily pay to have solved.
The difference today is that the infrastructure required to turn that knowledge into a business has gotten dramatically cheaper.
AI can help with research, coding, marketing, prospecting, customer service, content, accounting, presentations and administrative work. It does not magically create a business for you, but it gives one capable person leverage that would have required several employees not that long ago.
That is what I think is different this time.
Follow where the technology is going
One of the things that got me thinking about this recently was YouSpot, an AI native personal CRM built for one person companies. It comes from Dharmesh Shah, cofounder and CTO of HubSpot, and it is aimed at individual professionals: founders, consultants, investors and salespeople who want the capabilities of a CRM without an entire company or operations team behind them. It connects the tools someone already uses, Gmail, Calendar, LinkedIn and X among them, and builds what Shah calls a second brain out of what it finds. One plan, ten dollars a month, no seats to count.
What makes it worth noticing is not really the product. It is who is building it, and for whom. Shah announced it as a HubSpot Next project rather than a weekend side venture, and he was blunt about who it is not for. If you have a go to market team and you are trying to grow, buy HubSpot. YouSpot is for the company of one.
So a business that has spent twenty years studying where buyers go next has put resources behind software whose entire addressable market is a single person working alone.
When major technology companies start designing products specifically around individual operators, there is usually a reason.
They are seeing a market developing. And I think they are right.
People are more capable than their job titles
One thing I have learned from recruiting thousands of people over the years is that companies routinely underestimate how capable their employees actually are.
Large organizations naturally put people into boxes. You are an engineer. You are in marketing. You are a recruiter. You are a product manager. You are in finance. You are in sales.
But after talking to people for a living for this long, I have met countless employees who understand far more about running a business than their job title suggests. They understand their customers, their industry, the product, the competition and where companies waste money. Most importantly, they understand problems, because they have spent years dealing with them.
Until recently, knowing how to solve a problem was not necessarily enough to build a company around it. You still needed capital, technology, employees and infrastructure.
AI is changing that equation very quickly.
The smartest engineer at a technology company may not need another engineering job. The marketing leader who just got laid off may not need another marketing department. The salesperson with 15 years of industry relationships may not need another VP of Sales telling them what territory to cover.
Some of these people are going to realize they can simply build something themselves.
There is still risk
I am definitely not suggesting everyone should quit their job tomorrow and become an entrepreneur. Running a business is difficult. You have to sell something. You have to find customers. You have to manage money. There is no guaranteed paycheck every other Friday, and there are plenty of people who will always prefer the structure and resources that come with working for a company.
There are also great companies that provide outstanding careers.
But I do think we need to reconsider what security means.
If you make $200,000 a year working for one company, you have one customer responsible for 100 percent of your income. If that company restructures your department, your revenue goes to zero.
A solo business earning from ten different customers may actually have more diversified income than the highly paid corporate employee.
That does not make entrepreneurship safer in every situation. It does make the comparison much more interesting than it used to be.
The career path is starting to look different
I think we are going to see more careers that look like portfolios rather than ladders. Someone might have consulting income, a small software product, advisory work, contract assignments or a specialized service business. They may still take a full time job when an interesting opportunity comes along, but their entire professional identity will not necessarily depend on that company.
That is probably where this gets really interesting.
AI is not just changing how companies operate. It is changing how small a company can be and still compete. The next generation of successful businesses may include thousands of companies with one employee. Highly specialized, extremely lean, AI enabled and intentionally small.
After watching this market for as long as I have, that no longer strikes me as a fringe outcome. It looks like a reasonable expectation.
Maybe your next move is not another job.