The people building the AI future are having an identity crisis about whether they matter in it.
The Summary
- Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das says no one in Silicon Valley is happy — not the newly rich AI founders, not the $500k engineers, not the middle managers watching their jobs vanish.
- AI boom wealth (jumping from $150k to $50M in years) creates profound purposelessness, while everyone else faces existential obsolescence.
- The divide isn't just income — it's between those whose work matters to the future and those watching their skills depreciate in real time.
The Signal
Das posted on X that over five years, a tiny cohort at Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, and smaller AI startups watched their net worth skyrocket. Not the gentle climb of equity vesting. The violent kind. Under $150k to over $50 million. Most hit that number younger than expected, before they'd built the psychological scaffolding to handle it.
The problem isn't the money. It's what comes after. One founder told Das they couldn't sell their company because selling meant keeping the wealth but losing the relevance. Building keeps you in the conversation. Exiting makes you rich and invisible. For people who've spent their entire careers deriving identity from being at the frontier, irrelevance is a worse outcome than being broke.
"If they sold, they would have money — but lose the attention and relevance that came with always building."
Meanwhile, the sub-$500k class — still objectively wealthy by any normal standard — feels trapped on a treadmill with no exit. Recent layoffs at Cloudflare and Coinbase, both citing AI as the reason, aren't anomalies. They're the leading edge of a much larger question: what happens to software engineers when agents write most of the code?
Das says many engineers now feel their core skill is becoming useless. Not obsolete in some distant future. Useless now. The work they spent a decade mastering is being compressed into prompts and agent workflows. The career ladder they climbed is being sawed off at the bottom.
Middle managers have it worse. The "Great Flattening" — where companies strip out layers of management in favor of leaner, AI-augmented teams — is back. Except this time it's not a cost-cutting measure during a downturn. It's a permanent structural shift. Managers see it coming and have no clear path forward.
Key dynamics at play:
- Wealth without purpose for the winners
- Skill depreciation anxiety for the middle
- Structural job elimination for the managerial class
This isn't a recession story. It's a realignment story. The AI boom is creating two kinds of people: those building the agents, and those being replaced by them. The gap between those groups isn't just economic. It's existential. One group is wrestling with meaning after financial arrival. The other is wrestling with meaning as their profession evaporates.
What makes this especially brutal is that both groups thought they were on the same path. They studied the same things, worked at the same companies, lived in the same neighborhoods. The divergence happened fast. Too fast for most people to adapt.
The Implication
If you're building agents or infrastructure for Web4, your biggest challenge isn't technical. It's figuring out what comes after you win. Financial security arrived, but the work that gave your life structure might be the only thing keeping you sane. Plan for that now, not later.
If you're not in the AI winner's circle, the question is sharper: what skills compound in an agent economy? What work do you do that agents can't? The answer isn't "learn to prompt." It's deeper. Find the work that requires judgment, taste, human relationships, or physical presence. Everything else is getting compressed.
The mood in Silicon Valley isn't just about tech industry drama. It's a preview of what happens everywhere when productivity explodes but purpose doesn't scale with it. Watch where the AI-rich put their energy next. That's the signal for what actually matters when money stops being the constraint.