Three texts, one conversation.
The Dear Swim Club column is usually for questions people submit. This one is a little different.
In the span of a few days, three people I know all at the same company, reached out to me separately. They weren't coordinated in their outreach. They didn't know the others had written to me. They don't even sit on the same teams.
What they were describing was the same situation. A founder had sent a message to the entire company, in a public channel, announcing that he was having AI audit everything — every transcript, every meeting, every DM — to find all the things he'd ever asked for that hadn't been done. He said he'd start spinning up agents to work on the unfinished items instead. And then he said: if the agents could do it faster, he might not need most of the people in the company.
He also told his team he couldn't protect them from market forces. That other CEOs were burning past him. He started forwarding articles about founders who were moving faster and told everyone to deeply understand the implications.
I won't publish the exact wording nor the company. It doesn't really matter. But I am publishing my response because these three conversations are really one conversation, and it's a conversation a lot more than three people are having right now inside that company and elsewhere.
What's actually happening here
Let's separate the two things happening in that public channel message, because they're different problems dressed in the same clothes.
Deploying AI to audit whether your team has followed your requests is not an efficiency play. It's a control play. And the instinct to control at that level usually doesn't come from confidence — it comes from the absence of it.
A lot of founders built something from nothing, which means they made every call for years. That history can create a deep, unexamined belief that the only reliable way to get something done is to personally verify it happened. Not because they're power-hungry but because they've never had to build trust in a team at scale. They haven't built this muscle.
When you haven't built real management infrastructure including how to set clear expectations, develop a shared definition of done, establishing a feedback loop that actually closes, you experience the absence of it as betrayal.
Things feel like they're falling through the cracks. People seem not to follow through. The problem feels personal, so the solution feels personal too: monitor the individuals rather than fix the system.
Using AI to audit compliance is what you reach for when you never learned to set expectations and verify outcomes through legitimate management. It's not a surveillance strategy. It's a management replacement strategy for someone who never developed the skills it was meant to replace.
The second thing he said was that he might not need most of the people in the company. He said it publicly, directly to the people it concerned.
A lot of leaders reach for pressure when they don't know how to motivate. It's not usually cynical. It's a capability gap dressed up as urgency. When you haven't developed the tools to build genuine momentum in a team, fear looks like a shortcut. And in the short term, it kind of is. People move. But they move scared, and scared people don't build anything worth keeping.
But the line that actually tells you what's happening here is the one about other CEOs burning past him. He's watching his peers, feeling like he's falling behind, and transmitting that feeling directly to his team as if it were information about the business. It isn't. It's information about him.
His employees aren't being pressured because the company is in trouble. They're being pressured because he is. And that distinction matters because it tells you exactly what you're dealing with and how much weight to give it.
Leaders are supposed to run toward the fire, not hand it to you
People don't resent hierarchy. They resent hierarchy that doesn't hold up its end of the deal. The leader gets the status, the pay, the protection and in exchange, they're supposed to be the one who absorbs the danger, not redistributes it. When a founder does what this one did, he's not just being a bad communicator. He's violating the implicit contract that made his position legitimate in the first place.
Simon Sinek made this point recently in a way that stuck with me: we don't actually mind that leaders earn more or hold more power.
What makes people angry is when the person at the top stops running toward danger and starts routing it downward instead. That's the betrayal. Not the hierarchy itself but the abdication of what the hierarchy was supposed to provide.
What's happening in a lot of founder-led companies right now is that the language is still collaborative — we're a team, we're building something together — but the power structure and the behaviour are increasingly extractive. You row, I steer, and if the boat slows down I'll replace the rowers. That gap between the stated culture and the actual dynamic is exactly what makes it feel so destabilising. People aren't just scared of losing their jobs. They're confused, because the rules they thought they were playing by turned out not to apply.
This is why what happened in that channel felt like more than a bad message. It felt like a betrayal. And it's worth naming it as one.
You can't give what you're not receiving
One of the three people who reached out said something that struck me. They said they feel like they're doing a terrible job with their own direct reports. That they should quit. That they're not sure why they haven't.
This isn't a separate problem from what the founder did. It's a direct consequence of it.
Fear-based cultures don't stay contained at the top. They travel. At each layer, people absorb what they can and pass the rest on. Not out of malice. Not even consciously most of the time. But you can't give what you're not receiving. When your energy is going toward managing your own anxiety, there's nothing left for the people who need you to be steady.
This isn't an argument for soft leadership or workplaces that mistake comfort for culture.
High performance requires pressure — the right kind. The difference between pressure that builds something and pressure that corrodes it is whether people feel clear, invested in, and trusted to do the job.
When those things are present, people don't just meet expectations. They exceed them because they want to. When they're absent, people work defensively. They optimise for not getting blamed rather than getting the right outcome. That's not a morale problem. It's an operational one, and it compounds quietly until it doesn't.
The most corrosive part of this isn't the anxiety itself. It's that it lands in your body feeling like your fault. Like you're not cut out for this, not good enough, not moving fast enough. That's what fear-based environments do: they make systemic failures feel personal. And once you understand that mechanism, it becomes a lot harder to keep punishing yourself for it.
What to do with this information
First: separate what's yours from what isn't.
I've been in environments where I started to believe that the anxiety I felt was a reflection of my own performance. It wasn't. It was a reflection of the environment. And it was people more experienced than me who helped identify and label it. That distinction is hard to see when you're inside it, but it matters because you cannot fix a systemic problem by working harder on yourself.
Start by honestly assessing what is genuinely within your control and what is being handed down to you from above. That's not an excuse to abdicate accountability. Accountability still matters. It's actually one of the things that will keep you grounded when everything above you feels uncertain. But accountability without clarity is just guilt with a productivity wrapper.
Second: look at how your direct leader — not the founder, but the person actually responsible for you — is behaving right now.
Are they translating the fear downward, or are they absorbing it? Are they being honest with you about what they know? Are they advocating for you, or managing up and hoping this latest wave of explosive behaviour blows over?
That person's behaviour in the next few weeks will tell you more about your situation than anything the founder says. Whether you have someone above you who is steady right now is the difference between going through a hard period and being broken by one. This could also be a great learning lesson in (hopefully) how to lead through turbulent times.
Third: if you're managing a team, don't pass the fear down.
Your team is watching you more carefully than you know right now. The way you show up in the next few weeks is what they'll remember.
I've sat in this exact position: questioning whether I was cut out for it, whether the job was asking too much, whether I even wanted to keep doing it. What I learned is that candour is your best tool. People want to be levelled with, not managed or spoken down to. Name what's real, come with a point of view on how to move through it, and give your team something to hold onto.
Come with a clear plan, not a vague "All Hands" meeting that says you're exploring how to tackle a meaningful shift into AI, but actual next steps and actual outcomes. This is an act of leadership in itself.
And tell your team's story as you go. Share what you're building before it's finished. That visibility is what separates leaders who get remembered from ones who just endured.
And underneath all of this: how do you feel when you close your laptop? If the honest answer most days is drained, that's not a rough patch. What drains out isn't just motivation. It's judgement, generosity, the willingness to go the extra mile for something you're no longer sure believes in you.
What comes next
These three conversations didn't just prompt a response. They confirmed something I've been thinking about for a long time and felt compelled to say out loud. It's also a core driver for why I started Swim Club.
What I keep coming back to is something I call Talent Capitalism: the belief that the real moat for any excellent leader is the effectiveness of the people around them, and that investing in those people deliberately and precisely is not a soft choice — it's a strategic one. The direct opposite of what happened in that public channel. I've worked in exceptionally high pressured environments that took care of and invested in the individual. You can have it all — a high growth, deeply principled, high performance company — and happy workers and leaders.
The next few pieces I'm writing are going to go deeper. I'll dig into what I mean by talent capitalism and why I chose that word intentionally. The shift that many of us are experiencing, what's actually happening to leadership right now, and why I think it's a bigger shift than most people are naming. And then the specific mechanics, so how I actually do this in practice.
Lastly, if you're one of the three people who wrote to me: I'm glad you did. You're not alone.
-AMG
