The Leverage Gap

My running group. My mortgage. And the $3M question I can't stop thinking about.

A friend who manages a 50-person team at a $4T chip company told me something last year that I haven’t been able to shake.

His youngest team member — the most junior person on the floor — had at least $3M in stock options. That was late last year. It’s probably more now.

My take-home as a CEO barely covers my mortgage.

Those two facts exist in the same economy, in the same city, at the same moment in time.

Saturday mornings I run with a pace group. Engineers, founders, operators — people who built careers the right way. Last week nobody talked about training. Everyone talked about AI: what it’s doing to their jobs, their industries, their sense of where they stand. Fear. Envy. A particular kind of exhaustion that comes from running hard and falling behind anyway.

Everyone’s first read on this is wealth inequality. A story about unfairness, about who got lucky, about which lottery ticket you happened to hold when the numbers were called.

That’s the symptom. The disease is something different.

For most of Silicon Valley’s history, there were multiple paths.

You could join HP or Cisco in the late nineties and build a career there. Twenty years of good work, compounding loyalty, a retirement that felt earned. It had a logic: be smart, work hard, pick a stable company, and the math rewards you over time. Not always rich. But stable, respected, fine.

That bargain is structurally gone.

Google, Meta, Microsoft — companies that were once the definition of a good career bet — offer no stable jobs now. Everything else in tech is worse. SaaSocalypse isn’t a buzzword; it’s a business model reckoning that’s been running for three years. And sitting above all of it, disconnected from the normal rules of effort and time, is a cluster of AI-native companies printing wealth for their employees at a scale and speed the industry has never seen.

What broke isn’t the economy. What broke is the time variable.

A 2-year window at the right AI company now outperforms 20 years of disciplined career execution at the wrong one. When that math inverts, people don’t just feel behind. They start questioning whether the game is worth playing at all. That psychological rupture — the sense that rules changed mid-game without anyone announcing it — is harder to recover from than any market correction.

Most people’s answer to this: work smarter, pick better, adapt faster. If you’re falling behind, the solution is in your hands.

That’s wrong. Worth saying clearly.

This gap isn’t about effort or talent. My running group isn’t less capable than the 25-year-old sitting on $3M in unvested options. They made reasonable bets on reasonable companies using rules that were reasonable when they made them. What they didn’t have — what most people don’t have — is access to leverage.

Capital flows to leverage now. Not purpose. Not effort. Not mission. Not a 20-year track record of delivering results for customers who actually needed the product.

Markets aren’t moral. The gap between those inside the leverage machine and everyone outside it is no longer a matter of intelligence or discipline. It’s a matter of which side of a line you were standing on when the capital decided to flow.

So what does a CEO in my position actually do with that?

Here’s what it looks like at my company right now. We’ve cut travel. Delayed bonuses. No pay raises — not for anyone, including me. These aren’t choices I made lightly. They’re what the math requires in this macro.

And yet my team is still here.

Not because they have to be. Because they believe in what we’re building and they’re grateful to be building it together. I watch that every day and I don’t take it for granted for a single second.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a different optimization function — and anyone who’s been on both sides of it will tell you it’s the better one. Genuine belief in the mission produces more lasting satisfaction than money does. The person hitting $20M at 30 with no particular reason to get out of bed is going to spend the next decade figuring that out the expensive way.

Believing in the mission harder than ever isn’t the loser’s framing. It’s the right bet if you actually want a life worth living at the finish line — for yourself and for the people running with you.

Sometimes on those Saturday runs, between miles and conversations about job security and AI and who just got rich, I think about those people. Smart, capable, running hard. Trying to figure out which game they’re even playing anymore.

The $3M kid at the chip company isn’t the villain of this story. He’s just inside the machine. Most of the people I run with aren’t, and neither am I.

But purpose is the one variable that doesn’t get repriced by a venture capital cycle. It doesn’t evaporate when the leverage machine slows down. And it’s what makes the work mean something, regardless of which game the market decided to reward.

Capital follows leverage. Purpose follows meaning. You don’t get to choose which game the market plays.

You do get to choose which one you win.