The Tech Sales Newsletter #102: Understanding e/acc
One of the biggest divides right now in tech is a deeply philosophical one, rather than just based on competition. While there is nothing wrong with bland companies that help their employees earn an honest dollar, there is an argument to be made that work can be meaningful and rewarding beyond just financial compensation.
For those leaning on the left side of the political spectrum, the highest intellectual realization of their vision in the tech context was the Effective Altruism movement, which advocated for a big focus on reasoning and AI research deceleration, while redistributing the spoils of tech revenues to select causes.
For the rest, Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) has emerged as a guiding frame of mind. Today, more than ever, understanding the e/acc movement and its sphere of influence is critical in seeing why most tech companies approach AI with dramatically different goals. It's also a useful mental model in predicting great companies to work at and invest in, as we move towards "real-world AI".
The key takeaway
For tech sales: As companies are spending hundreds of millions on bringing in talented AI researchers and VC funds are investing heavily in real-world AI, it's time to ask yourself what the deeper motivation behind that is. In many cases, there is a deeper motivation for these strategies beyond simply increasing shareholder value.
For investors: We've already touched on this in previous articles—the most exciting investment opportunities today are limited to private companies, and as usual, the risk profile of most of these investments is closer to "losing everything" rather than just taking a loss. Investing in these opportunities means making a decision based on more than just perceived odds of success; it means choosing investments because you want your funds to lead to improved outcomes.
Special event announcement: I’ll run a one-time bootcamp to go over the key elements of “How to sell AI” in person.
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Day 1: 8/2
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Day 3: 8/8
Sign up this week for an early bird pricing of $850 USD. This will also include permanent access to the “How to sell AI” learning platform ($500 regular price).
The techno-optimism point of view
We are being lied to.
We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.
We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.
We are told to be pessimistic.
Marc Andreessen's introduction to techno-optimism starts with a rejection of the idea that tech drives negative outcomes across society.
Our civilization was built on technology.
Our civilization is built on technology.
Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.
If anything, we sit on the shoulders of giants, benefiting from a tremendous amount of momentum and vision.
Techno-Optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.
We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being.
We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”
We believe everything good is downstream of growth.
We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.
There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.
Natural resource utilization has sharp limits, both real and political.
And so the only perpetual source of growth is technology.
In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.
We believe technology is a lever on the world – the way to make more with less.
One of the primary arguments behind e/acc is the idea that the majority of progress in the last 25 years has occurred in the world of bits, rather than atoms. This has been a great benefit to the companies creating revenue through software, but it's often difficult to actually demonstrate real-world outcomes that benefit from it. The most obvious example being social media—one of the most widely used technologies in terms of productive hours spent on it, with very little material benefit in the real world.
Techno-optimism advocates not simply for technology as a sector, but for meaningful technology that drives economic and quality-of-life growth.
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.
We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. All actual information is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the buyer. The center, abstracted away from both the buyer and the seller, knows nothing. Centralized planning is doomed to fail, the system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death.
We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
Underpinning the desire to drive growth is the expectation of having the right conditions to do so. If effective altruism was focused on directing and redistributing wealth across areas deemed important, e/acc leans into the "equal opportunity, unequal outcomes" vision of free markets being the best operating system for growth.
We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
We believe technological change, far from reducing the need for human work, increases it, by broadening the scope of what humans can productively do.
We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.
We believe markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum, not zero sum. Participants in markets build on one another’s work and output. James Carse describes finite games and infinite games – finite games have an end, when one person wins and another person loses; infinite games never end, as players collaborate to discover what’s possible in the game. Markets are the ultimate infinite game.
In the view of e/acc, working in technology can and should be a meaningful and emotional experience. Being part of companies focused only on mere existence is demotivating and ultimately regressive.
Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
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Ray Kurzweil defines his Law of Accelerating Returns: Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance.
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.
We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.
We believe the cornerstone resources of the techno-capital upward spiral are intelligence and energy – ideas, and the power to make them real.
It's not difficult to see the workings of the techno-capital machine through the recent explosion of AI across all spheres of life. If working in tech five years ago was connected to yet-another B2B SaaS vertical application for a niche audience (recruitment tool for Polish speakers based abroad type of thing), today we are seeing almost every week a new performance breakthrough or a company tackling real-world problems nobody had bothered to solve before. This is also driving a lot of insecurity in tech sales, as "the playbook of SaaS" companies no longer works and many are struggling to align with the new reality.
We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.
We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral – first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.
We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights.
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
One of the subtle but critical nuances of e/acc is the fundamentally democratic impact of scaling AI across all parts of society. AI is a lever to elevate society, rather than control it.
Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth.
We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.
The current gap in per-capita energy use between the smaller developed world and larger developing world is enormous. That gap will close – either by massively expanding energy production, making everyone better off, or by massively reducing energy production, making everyone worse off.
We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.
Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953: “For years the splitting atom, packaged in weapons, has been our main shield against the barbarians. Now, in addition, it is a God-given instrument to do the constructive work of mankind.” Murray was right too.
We believe a second energy silver bullet is coming – nuclear fusion. We should build that as well. The same bad ideas that effectively outlawed fission are going to try to outlaw fusion. We should not let them.
Scaling AI is tightly related to the energy footprint necessary to do so. In a way, e/acc is a rejection of the environmental movement that became a dominant point of view in society through the idea of minimizing our footprint and energy consumption.
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence and energy to make everything we want and need abundant.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income. If a lot of goods and services drop in price, the result is an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life.
We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a pencil and fail to return it. We should make the same true of all physical goods.
We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.
We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.
This is the biggest bet that e/acc wants to make. Those that critique the movement see it as reckless and benefiting only those that are able to harness "the techno-capital machine". Those inside of the movement see it as the best chance we have of essentially eradicating poverty in the world of atoms, not just bits.
However, we are not Utopians.
We are adherents to what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision.
We believe the Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.
We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse.
We believe change only happens on the margin – but a lot of change across a very large margin can lead to big outcomes.
The goal, however, is not to redefine society by pushing norms of behaviour. One of the most curious parts of Musk's vision for Mars, for example, is the opportunity for that society to pick its own norms and rules.
We believe that while the physical frontier, at least here on Earth, is closed, the technological frontier is wide open.
We believe in exploring and claiming the technological frontier.
We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.
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To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology – both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.
We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.
We believe in greatness. We admire the great technologists and industrialists who came before us, and we aspire to make them proud of us today.
And we believe in humanity – individually and collectively.
By now it should be obvious that e/acc is not just about the outcome of the movement but the path to get there. Being in tech is not simply a job, it's an extension of meaning if pursued as a greater call.
For this to be real, of course, you have to spend your days on more interesting things than doing outbound calls for HR software.
We believe extrinsic motivations – wealth, fame, revenge – are fine as far as they go. But we believe intrinsic motivations – the satisfaction of building something new, the camaraderie of being on a team, the achievement of becoming a better version of oneself – are more fulfilling and more lasting.
We believe in what the Greeks called eudaimonia through arete – flourishing through excellence.
We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.
We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”, trust via aligned incentives, generosity of spirit to help one another learn and grow.
We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.
We believe technology makes greatness more possible and more likely.
We believe in fulfilling our potential, becoming fully human – for ourselves, our communities, and our society.
It's not a coincidence that a lot of the thought leaders behind e/acc have more recently become very vocal around the idea of American Dynamism.
These types of ideas are currently very counter to how continental Europe operates and fundamentally opposed to the rest of the world. There is only one place where this is possible today.
The American Dynamism practice invests in founders and companies that support the national interest: aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing. We believe that mission-driven and civic-minded founders often build companies that transcend verticals and business models in their quest to solve important national problems. These companies view the government as a customer, competitor, or key stakeholder—and the success of these companies supports the flourishing of all Americans. Dynamic companies exist in all 50 states and have a global impact.
When I talk about "real-world AI", we often focus on Tesla as a great example due to both autonomous driving and their work on putting humanoid robots into factories. If we look at where a lot of the funding for "real-world AI" is going today, the reality is that Anduril and other defense-oriented companies have significantly more attention and they are attracting a lot of talent that wants to move away from working from home and drinking matcha lattes into doing real engineering, manufacturing and logistics at a scale. The mission behind it is tied to the idea of an American Renewal - realizing the vision of e/acc in the only country that has the appetite for it.
It’s 2027. The world is on edge. After years of posturing, The People’s Republic of China (PRC) launches an incursion into Taiwan. Within hours, global supply chains stall. Overnight, key materials destined for the U.S. — including batteries, actuators, motors, and more — are halted. TSMC, which produces nearly 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips, goes dark, crippling industries from banking to defense. Essential research advancing fields like AI and biotechnology come to a standstill. Russia, sensing an opportunity, aligns with China and cuts off gas exports, sending fuel prices skyrocketing. Markets plunge. Inflation surges. The Indo-Pacific, the backbone of global commerce, is in chaos.
Nobody wants this, but it’s not entirely in our control. The PRC is engaged in the largest peacetime military buildup since World War II, with an industrial advantage in warships, drones, and other weapons of war. It has spent years pressuring U.S. allies, attacking civilian vessels, cutting undersea cables, and engaging in simulated wargames just miles from Taiwan’s shores. It is an expansionist power preparing for war. And war would be catastrophic. Even the most conservative estimates predict trillions in economic losses and global depression. And that does not even contemplate the human cost which, as the Ukraine conflict has taught us, can be dire.
But there is a way to deter this future: peace through strength, built on technology. Washington has spent years preparing for this moment, and Silicon Valley is building for it too. This project highlights 50 tech companies uniquely positioned to prevent this conflict and fortify the U.S. against the threats an Indo-Pacific crisis would unleash, from securing self-sustaining supply chains to building AI-powered defense systems and resilient energy infrastructure.
The fight of the future is already underway across factories, testing labs, and R&D hubs in El Segundo, San Francisco, Austin, and beyond. These 50 companies aren’t just strengthening America’s ability to avoid conflict, they’re re-industrializing America in the process — and that’s an even bigger win.
This is taken from an article on the “Top 50” companies that have been funded in this direction. I think that it’s self-explanatory. Coming back to Techno-Optimism:
We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
Our enemy is stagnation.
Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.
Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.
Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.
Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.
In practice, e/acc is a rejection of both regulation, as well as centralized control over tech companies. They prefer for bad ideas to fail on their merits in the public marketplace and vice versa, for great companies to be unconstrained in how they scale.
Where did we come from?
Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.
Where are we going?
What world are we building for our children and their children, and their children?
A world of fear, guilt, and resentment?
Or a world of ambition, abundance, and adventure?
We believe in the words of David Deutsch: “We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus it is our duty to fight for a better world.”
We owe the past, and the future.
It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist.
It’s time to build.
Whether it will be called e/acc or some other flavor, the core themes here should be clear: technology is seen as a force for good; in order to deliver its outcomes, we have to progress faster than ever before; AI is the lever that will change everything about human existence in the world of atoms.
This sphere of thought is prevalent across some of the most influential (and well funded) players in tech today. Its vision has materialized behind companies like Palantir, Anduril, Tesla (to name a few very popular examples) and has more recently extended across a variety of new companies being funded across the industry. Most of these are closer to what we would consider deep tech (technologies that require inventing something new in order to work).
Most of us do not currently work in e/acc companies. Instead, we are part of what has become the more dominant part of tech in the last decade: companies that are mostly useless besides for the revenue they generate and the individuals benefiting from it. I doubt that most of you will be proud to tell your grandkids how you had a 5-year stint at LinkedIn and you were AT THE FRONTIER OF ADVANCING SOCIAL SELLING.
What e/acc raises as an idea is the possibility for you to still spend your 40-60 hours per week working and earning money, but also be able to actually contribute in a more meaningful way to the world around you. Cloud infrastructure software is currently the most practical way to be part of companies that have meaningful impact towards technological progress, but things are changing quickly. As automation starts taking over large parts of the day-to-day operations, headcount and role "optimization" will only accelerate. Whether you like it or not, the good opportunities in the next decade will likely require you to go outside of your comfort zone.
We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.
What a time to be alive, tech sales anon.
