This founder isn’t hiring junior engineers anymore

Platformer · 4 weeks ago

Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika and now Wabi, stated that AI has made hiring junior engineers unsustainable for startups because they compete with what she calls a "1,000x engineer," and believes job loss concerns are justified rather than fantasy. Wabi, which launches publicly before month's end, is designed with a soccer-team model of 10 to 15 superstar employees with sizable equity, supported by contractors, reflecting Kuyda's belief that this structure is sufficient to build billion-dollar companies. Kuyda argues the industry is in the "Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces" and that as AI tools mature and enable rapid app creation, long-tail subscription software and traditional hiring models will be disrupted.