Sharp Rank

Pip: Mukund Mohan has been watching tech companies celebrate record revenue while simultaneously handing out layoff notices, and he'd like a word.Mara: This episode is one deep dive — into the financial mechanics quietly reshaping how tech companies hire, compensate, and measure success. Stock-based compensation, AI token economics, and what it means for anyone leading a team right now.Pip: Let's…

If you look at the tech landscape right now, something doesn’t add up. Companies like Cloudflare, Wix, and ClickUp are posting spectacular revenue growth and hitting record metrics. Yet, the layoffs haven’t stopped. Executives stand on stage pointing at “AI restructuring,” leaving thousands of product managers and engineers wondering: If we are winning, why are we shrinking? To understand…

A single AI agent is useful. A team of AI agents working together is a completely different category of software. Most people still think about AI agents the wrong way. They imagine a single super-agent that can research, write, code, analyze, review, and execute tasks end-to-end. That model works for demos. It breaks under real production complexity. What is emerging instead is something much…

Sometimes speed is just impatience wearing ambition’s clothes. Silicon Valley has always been brutal about the future. Nobody cares what you built ten years ago.Nobody gives you permanent credit because you took a company public.If you stop building, you disappear. That’s actually one of the best things about the Valley. But lately, I think speed has curdled into something else. Speed with…

Most people still use AI like it is a chatbot. That framing is already obsolete. AI is not becoming a feature. It is becoming a complete industrial stack, with its own infrastructure layers, operating systems, orchestration frameworks, application ecosystems, and economic gravity. What cloud computing did to enterprise infrastructure over the last twenty years, AI is about to do to every layer…

AI and LLMS won’t kill Salesforce or most other SaaS. First: Salesforce was never “just” the UI. The UI was the enforcement mechanism for structured data capture. That is different. The real moat was always organizational standardization. Salesforce won because entire GTM organizations reorganized themselves around its ontology: Accounts, Opportunities, Stages, Forecasts, Territories, Approvals.…

What AI is actually doing to companies beneath the product layer is not obvious to most entrepreneurs. It is not really about recruiting. It is about institutional design becoming the new competitive advantage once software itself becomes fluid. The core argument is simple: When models, workflows, interfaces, and even product categories converge fast enough, the durable moat shifts away from…

The famous “$1 software, $6 services” idea has been floating around Silicon Valley for years. The premise is simple: for every dollar spent on software, companies spend roughly six dollars implementing, operating, customizing, integrating, managing, and extracting value from that software through services. What is interesting now is that AI companies are all implicitly claiming they can capture…

I am an AI maximalist. What that means is that from day one I believe it will create more jobs eventually. I have been consistent on this. Why? AI collapses the marginal cost of cognition. When the marginal cost of a core production input collapses, systems reorganize around abundance, not scarcity. That is what happened with:energy, transportation, computation, communication, and…

The core argument is straightforward but consequential: “vibe coding” collapses the distance between idea and software, transforming code from a specialized production activity into a personal, iterative medium. The implication is not just faster development. It is a structural shift in where value accrues. When anyone with taste and intent can produce working software on demand, the scarcity…

The AI “Supercycle” AI Supercycle refers to a multi-decade technological and economic cycle in which artificial intelligence drives sustained, large-scale investment, innovation, and value creation across the entire technology stack—spanning energy, semiconductors (chips), infrastructure (cloud and data centers), foundation models, and applications. It is characterized by massive capital…

Claude, AI Vibe Coding, Enterprise Coding is no longer a niche topic. It is becoming a practical question for teams that want to ship faster without losing control of quality, stability, or security. I think the core challenge is simple: if AI can produce larger and larger chunks of software work, I cannot stay productive by insisting on reading and hand-authoring every line forever. That does…

If you are searching for a practical way to use Claude Design, Claude, Figma style workflows for video editing, motion graphics, and branded promo assets, the biggest shift is simple: I can now describe edits in natural language instead of building every animation by hand. This matters most when I need to add animated text, subtitles, charts, overlays, branded scenes, or UI-style motion graphics…

“Will AI replace Adobe?” This has been the dominant narrative for two years. Generative image tools, text-to-video, AI design assistants — the assumption being that someone with a better model wins the creative market and Adobe becomes irrelevant. Adobe’s move this week is a direct answer to that narrative. And the answer is: we’re not playing that game. What actually happened At Adobe Summit…