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Hi friends, I’m excited to share that I’ve started a new chapter as Director of Developer Relations at 1Password! Read more about the news and please support by liking it :) → I’m currently in Philly for our company offsite, but we’ve also got a lot happening in San Francisco. Tomorrow, we’re hosting one of our most popular events yet: our unofficial Dreamforce party, The Prohibition Era, where we’re taking over Barbarossa for a prohibition-themed night. Then we’re following that up with our signature B2B Founder/VC Breakfast, bringing together dozens of VCs, founders, and builders for a morning of conversations, connections, and ideas. It’s been a busy and energizing start to this new role, and I’m excited for what’s ahead. Best, Mariane

— Mariane Bekker

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This Week's Journal

What jobs will AI replace?

AI is moving so fast that I think we’re asking the wrong question.

Everyone keeps asking:

What jobs will AI replace?

I’ve started wondering about something different:

What happens to teams when every person suddenly has significantly more leverage?

For most of the software era, companies scaled by adding people.

More customers meant more support.
More products meant more engineers.
More campaigns meant more marketers.
More complexity meant more managers coordinating all of those people.

But AI is starting to break that relationship.

A founder can go from idea to working prototype without assembling an engineering team first.

An engineer can write code, test it, debug it, document it and understand an unfamiliar codebase dramatically faster.

A designer can prototype interactions instead of waiting for every idea to move through a full product cycle.

A marketer can research a market, analyze competitors, draft a campaign, create assets and evaluate the results with tools that barely existed a few years ago.

The interesting thing isn’t that these jobs disappear.

It’s that the boundaries between them start to disappear.

The best engineer may increasingly think like a product manager.
The best marketer may build their own internal tools.
Founders may stay much smaller for much longer.

And teams that once required 20 people may someday be built with five extraordinarily leveraged people and a collection of agents working alongside them.

That changes more than headcount.

It changes how companies hire.
It changes what skills become valuable.
It changes management.
It changes how quickly ideas can become products.

And I think it makes judgment, creativity, taste, communication and the ability to understand a customer even more important — because execution itself keeps getting cheaper.

But there is another shift happening underneath all of this that I find even more interesting.

AI isn’t only becoming something we use.
It’s becoming something that acts.
Agents can call APIs.
They can access databases.
They can write and execute code.
They can interact with company systems.
They can use credentials and take actions on our behalf.

Which means we’re moving toward a world where companies aren’t made up only of human employees anymore.

There will be humans.
There will be software.

And increasingly, there will be autonomous or semi-autonomous agents operating somewhere in between.

That creates a completely new set of questions.

Who is this agent?
What is it allowed to access?
Which credentials should it have?
How long should that access exist?

How do we know an action was taken by the right human or the right agent?

And how do companies give agents enough access to be useful without handing them the keys to everything?

Identity and security become incredibly important in that world.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve joined 1Password as Director of Developer Relations.

I’ll be building our Developer Relations organization and working with developers, founders and companies figuring out how identity and security evolve in an agentic world.

I’ve spent most of my career building engineering organizations and developer communities.

Now I get to think about what those organizations look like in a world where the definition of a “team” itself may be changing.

P.S. VIP members get into B2B Founder/VC Breakfast @ Focus Innovation S… and WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America (and 2 more) free this week — it's where these conversations continue in person. If you'd like to be in the room, here's how VIP works.

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📓 Founders Bay Journal — What jobs will AI replace? | Sep 16

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