#21: Where Humans Outcompete Machines
The ideological capture of Corporate America makes some of our guys feel hopeless. From inside the cubicle farm, it looks like our enemies control everything.
But maintenance of the HR panopticon requires scale and systematization, and there are broad swaths of the economy where that just isn’t possible — where individuals and small businesses are still handily outmaneuvering corporate egregores.
This post isn’t really about AI — but the same economic forces that drive AI research (getting machines to think and act like humans) also drive the cybernetic structure of corporations (getting humans to think and act like machines).
So, whether your goal is to escape “Woke Capital”, or just to find a job that won’t be eaten by ChatGPT, you are looking for the same thing: jobs that resist systematization.
With so many successful entrepreneurs passing through EXIT, I’m beginning to notice patterns. Here are a handful of sectors where human-scaled, independent small businesses are thriving.
B2B App Development
Every service business has weird little unmet IT needs that a small team could solve — plumbers, landscapers, car-washes, etc. If you can introduce a small business owner to an app that makes some small component of their job faster, simpler, or more reliable, the pitch writes itself:
“Here’s what it costs you to operate without my product — here’s what you’ll save — here’s what I charge”.
Most of these projects are too narrow to be profitable for a megacorp to develop internally — but they often buy such projects once they take off, which provides a ready-made financial exit when it’s time to move on.
Obviously having code skills helps, but at EXIT we have several non-code entrepreneurs who have built a technical team to develop their idea.
(One of them literally wrote the book on how to do it.)
Corporate Consulting
Maybe you think your job is so bureaucratized, so internalized, that you couldn’t possibly do it independently. In some cases that’s true, and you have to reskill in order to pivot — but take a look at the smaller fish in your megacorp’s ecosystem: subcontractors, vendors, distributors, suppliers. Could any of them use your knowledge on a fractional or contract basis?
Obviously you should look at whatever NDAs or noncompetes you were required to sign with your employer, but we’ve seen seemingly hopeless megacorp jobs transmuted into independent consultancies this way. This approach makes the best sense for experienced professionals with lots of intangible, experiential “sherpa” knowledge of their industry.
Skilled Trades (I know, I know)
You don’t want to be hands-on in your 50s and 60s, but for a young man, skilled trades provide a very straightforward path to wealth in construction management, general contracting, and real estate investing.
Physical services are hard for megacorps to capture because they involve lots of interpersonal nuance and people-management that is difficult to systematize. At scale, each of these businesses becomes a quasi-feudal thing, defined by relationships and reputation. Not every skilled tradesman has the business acumen or people skills to do this, which is why the ones who do make a lot of money. It can be a very good way to live.
Heavy Equipment
Megacorps struggle to compete in heavy equipment, not because they can’t buy the machines, but because they can’t vet and insure operators at scale. There will never be an Amazon Basics excavation service.
But because of the up-front capital requirement, you don’t have to start out competing with unskilled labor; so if you’re well-compensated but miserable in your corporate job and can put together $50-$150K liquid, you can buy a business that amounts to playing in the dirt all day long.
IT Consulting/Contracting
Most small businesses don’t need and can’t afford in-house IT, but will pay for good web design, database management, infrastructure help, etc. Companies like Wix and Squarespace can serve up basic e-commerce websites at scale, but there are thousands of businesses outgrowing their out-of-the-box solution every day.
If you’ve got code skills, the best place to start market research is contracting sites like Upwork or TopTal. Learn what clients are paying for your skill set, and what complementary tools you might pick up to boost your hourly rate.
The challenge that all these jobs have in common is that they require you to clearly identify and defend your individual value.
A megacorp job is passive: they place the work in front of you, and you do it. You don’t have to worry about whether it’s useful, or who will pay for it — let alone finding and convincing someone to pay for it.
It seems cozy, but everyone who has held one of these jobs knows the slow-burning panic of having no real idea why you are paid to do your job — the sense that you are really only living on someone else's sufferance (or neglect), & it's a matter of time before they find you out.
That’s not just paranoia: we can all sense that, eventually, the money machine is going to run out, & people whose value is nebulous will be in bad shape.
Entrepreneurship means confronting & defining the value of what you do — cutting away the make-work, and figuring out what, if anything, you have to offer the real economy. Fake email jobs will not last forever; but you can use this time to build for what’s next.
Join us at exitgroup.us.
That heavy machinery company sounds very interesting... Gonna look into that