The Founder’s Vertigo: Balancing Hyper-Growth With The Fear Of Irrelevance

Holden Bruce is a Raisi founder and a software engineer building outreach systems that help startups with fundraising & investor engagement.

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Three years ago, my workflow as an engineer accelerated fivefold. A year ago, it jumped another 10 times. Today, I'm tearing through architectural builds in five days that would have taken me an entire summer to complete when I was starting my first company.

​As a CTO and machine learning researcher who built my first language model in a world before ChatGPT, I should be celebrating this acceleration. Instead, I feel something similar to vertigo.

​In the AI era, the traditional pride of craftsmanship—the slow, methodical mastery of a technical stack—is being replaced by a frantic sprint to stay ahead of a wave that feels like it’s always about to break. For today’s founders (myself included), the challenge is no longer just building a product that solves a need; it’s doing that at breakneck speed while maintaining a sense of stability when the ground is moving faster and faster under your feet.

​The Erosion Of The Technical Moat

Early in my career, the "10x developer" was a mythologized figure. I spent years rounding out my skills to reach that status: a master’s degree in natural language processing, moving through the ranks of database engineer, front-end developer and systems architect. I believed my personal "moat" was this cumulative technical depth, my ability to juggle complex backend logic with specialized research.

​But when tools like Cursor allow developers to mimic the output of a senior architect, that moat starts to evaporate. When everyone is a "10x developer,” technical skill is no longer a differentiator—it’s the baseline.​

This increase in speed is a business miracle, allowing for scale without increasing headcount. But it comes with a curse: the hollow feeling that your hard-earned expertise is being commoditized.

​If technical execution is becoming free, what remains valuable? My answer is: vision and judgment.​

In the past, a startup CTO’s value was largely measured by their ability to manage complex technical debt and sprint velocity. Today, velocity is a given. The new metric is meaningful direction.​

For tech leaders navigating this vertigo, I offer three shifts in mindset:

1. Stop measuring output; start measuring outcome. If AI can write 1,000 lines of code in seconds, then “lines of code" is a dead metric. Focus on the value you create for the customer. How can you make their lives easier? How can you make your product so sticky that they'll never leave you? Listen to the customer and build elegant solutions to their problems.

2. Lean into your expertise. AI is excellent at specific tasks but still struggles with the intersection of nuances, like how a database architecture affects a specific go-to-market strategy. Lean into your intuition; it’s your biggest asset.

3. Accept the speed. Vertigo happens when your inner self doesn't match what your eyes are seeing. In tech, that "inner self" is our old pace of business. We have to recalibrate to the reality that five-day sprints instead of quarterly projects is the new normal.​

The Founder’s Pre-Mortem

I often feel an impending time clock above my head, a sense of urgency to capture as much value as possible before the tools I use make me irrelevant. Ironically, this paranoia is likely my greatest survival mechanism.

In systems design, a pre-mortem is the exercise of imagining a system has already failed so you can work backward to identify the cause. I've moved into a state of permanent pre-mortem: The very fact that I understand my potential insignificance is exactly what prevents it.

For a founder, this means developing a high tolerance for ambiguity. Success in the AI era requires being hyper-aware of how your product, your market or your own skill set could become obsolete and then engineering a path around those landmines.​

If you're blissfully unaware of the ways your business could be destroyed—whether by external or internal factors—you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you can anticipate the pitfalls of your trajectory, you can build a path around it. This isn't paranoia; it's a survival mechanism that forces you to move from execution to judgment before the market makes that choice for you.​​

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