Most conversations about AI at work sound the same. New tools. New models. New productivity hacks. That framing misses the point.
The real disruption isn’t that machines are getting smarter. It’s that humans are still showing up to work with industrial-age instincts, while the ground under them is moving at exponential speed.
That tension sits at the heart of this conversation with Nikki Barua, founder and CEO of Flipwork, a company built around a simple but uncomfortable truth: you can’t modernize work without reinventing the people doing it.
From Human Doing to Human Being
For the last century, work trained us to be excellent doers. Follow instructions. Move tasks from inbox to outbox. Measure effort. Repeat.
That model worked when value was created through repetition.
AI breaks it.
When machines can execute faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors, effort stops being a differentiator. Time spent stops mattering. What matters instead is judgment, context, creativity, and the ability to define outcomes, not just complete tasks.
This is why so many AI initiatives stall. Companies invest heavily in technology while leaving human behavior untouched. The tools change. The mindset doesn’t. Nothing sticks.
Flipwork starts from the opposite direction. Reinvent the human first, then redesign the workflow, then deploy the tools. In that order.
Why Most AI Transformations Fail Quietly
Boards ask executives for an AI strategy. Leaders respond by treating it like an IT problem.
That’s the first mistake.
AI isn’t a software upgrade. It’s a forcing function that exposes every outdated assumption inside an organization, from how decisions get made to how power flows to how people define their worth.
When those assumptions stay intact, two things happen:
• AI gets used at the surface level, mostly for automation or content generation
• Shadow AI explodes, with individuals experimenting in isolation without alignment or governance
The organization looks busy but isn’t actually changing.
The companies making progress aren’t pretending to have all the answers. They’re running small, fast experiments, learning in public, and accepting that reinvention is continuous, not episodic.
The Real Identity Crisis Inside Companies
One of the most interesting threads in this conversation isn’t technical at all. It’s psychological.
Individual contributors struggle because their identity is often tied to effort. Long hours. High output. Being indispensable.
Managers struggle because their role has been about directing people. Telling teams what to do. Measuring compliance.
AI challenges both.
When agents can execute, the human role shifts toward sense-making. Providing context. Defining why something matters. Orchestrating outcomes across humans and machines.
This is why middle management gets squeezed. Not because leadership is unnecessary, but because the definition of leadership is changing.
The winners won’t be the best controllers. They’ll be the best clarifiers.
Adaptability Is the New Competitive Moat
For decades, companies differentiated through proprietary assets, distribution, or scale. Those advantages erode faster in an AI-native world.
What lasts longer is adaptability.
How fast can your organization unlearn?
How quickly can teams form, disband, and reform around outcomes?
How comfortable are people operating without a script?
Nikki frames the future org not as a pyramid, but as a network. Less Titanic, more fleet of speedboats. Small, autonomous teams moving fast in the same direction, loosely connected, constantly evolving.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening at the edges. The question is how fast the core catches up.
Reinvention Is a Muscle, Not a Moment
The most dangerous myth about change is that it’s a one-time event. A transformation initiative. A two-year roadmap.
In reality, reinvention behaves more like fitness. Short cycles. Repeated reps. Continuous feedback.
Flipwork operates in 90-day loops for a reason. The world won’t wait for perfection. Momentum matters more than certainty.
The companies and founders who thrive won’t be the ones with the best plans. They’ll be the ones with the fastest learning curves.
The Quiet Takeaway
AI will keep getting better. That part is inevitable.
What isn’t inevitable is whether humans evolve alongside it.
The future of work won’t be decided by models or tools. It will be decided by who is willing to let go of old identities, old incentives, and old definitions of value, and who isn’t.
Reinvention isn’t optional anymore. It’s the job.
👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL
🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast
Chapters:
00:01 Welcome and Nikki Barua Introduction
02:00 Reinvention as a Life Pattern
04:10 Immigrant Mindset and Resilience
06:20 Video Games, Mastery, and Growth
08:40 Enjoying the Grind
10:30 Boredom as a Signal for Change
12:00 Corporate Inertia and Slow Innovation
14:20 From Enterprise to Entrepreneurship
16:30 Building Flipwork
18:10 AI Is Not an IT Problem
20:00 Human and Machine Co-Evolution
22:10 From Task Doers to Outcome Orchestrators
24:30 Identity Crisis at Work
27:00 Middle Management Gets Squeezed
29:30 Enterprise AI Blind Spots
32:00 Adaptability as the New Moat
35:00 The Industrial Age Is Over
38:00 Neural Network Organizations
41:20 Reinvention as a Muscle
43:40 The End of Full-Time Jobs
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:09):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Nikki Barua on the mic. She is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, transformational leader, and one of the most recognized voices on reinvention and human capability in the AI age. She spent nearly 25 years helping organizations rethink culture, leadership, and growth, built and scaled multiple companies. She’s been honored by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the 100 most influential women and featured across CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Forbes. Today, she’s leading Flipwork and championing a movement to make people exponentially capable in the age of AI. Thanks for coming on, Nikki.
Nikki Barua (00:01:43):
Thanks for inviting me, Brian. Thrilled to be here.
Brian Bell (00:01:45):
Yeah, I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background? What’s your trauma that drives you?
Nikki Barua (00:01:50):
I love that. Well, the through line of my story is all about reinvention. As someone who grew up in India in the 70s and 80s and did not have a lot of exposure to tech or media, the world in general, I was always a really big dreamer. And I really believed as I grew up that America is a place where those dreams would come true. That’s what brought me to this incredible country and kind of really built my career, my businesses here. But every chapter of that story has really been about adapting to change, figuring out how to make it, how to survive, really be resilient through every obstacle that I’ve faced along the way. And before you know it, it becomes your superpower, right? You go from doing things out of survival to realizing that is actually what allows you to make it through every twist and turn.
Brian Bell (00:02:42):
Yeah, I love that. And I have a similar upbringing and growing up poor and working full time since I was 11 to like, I could buy shoes for school and stuff. And yeah, and it does become your superpower over time.
Nikki Barua (00:02:55):
Yeah, in the moments of that struggle, it’s kind of hard to see it sometimes because there’s a part of you that’s sort of like in that woe is me state of why do bad things happen to me? Why is my life so hard? And why does everybody else have the things that I do seek and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get it. They’re all those stories that you’re caught up in in the moment. And then you get out of that and you overcome that. And it’s sort of like getting to the next level of a video game, right? When you’re in it, you’re kind of stuck and you’re like, I don’t know what to do. And then you get to the next level and you’re like, wow, the very thing that I struggle with is what helps me win at this next level of the game.
Brian Bell (00:03:34):
Yeah, I love that. It’s why I like to back founders that were exceptional at video games. It tends to predict future success. And I’ve noticed this with some of my founders that are very successful. They were, you know, top 1%, you know, semi-pro player in Fortnite or Rocket League or, you know, Starcraft or something like that. And I think that kind of experience teaches you a little tenacity and wherewithal to kind of break through challenges and keep grinding. And I think it’s such a problem in this country right now is what makes America great is you can come here with nothing, you know, be successful, right? And then you get people in the country who, you’re like well what can the government give me it’s like no what can you get out of your house and go like capture some value create some value look at all the people doing it around you you have no excuse right you started here i mean to me that’s one of the greatest things about this country is just the meritocracy of being able to come here with a dream no privilege no power no resources and still figure it out and there aren’t the same kind of, you know, even though there’s so much talk about systemic barriers here, and I’m not denying that there are some, but when you compare to so many other parts of the world, there are things that are designed to just keep you down. It doesn’t matter.
Nikki Barua (00:04:49):
Well, especially in India, right?
Brian Bell (00:04:51):
Right, I mean, population by itself is one of those things, right? When there’s 1.5 billion people fighting for very limited resources and a landmass less than America, you’re just not going to have the same kind of access. You have to be the best of the best of the best to get anywhere with that.
Nikki Barua (00:05:09):
So the struggle is real. And compared to that, it’s so much easier here, but you have to be self-directed. That’s the most important thing is that the sky’s the limit. As long as you take a hundred percent accountability for everything good or bad in your life, you take total ownership and you’re self-directed and you’re willing to hustle and grind and you know, stick it through every challenge and twist and turn of your story.
Brian Bell (00:05:34):
Yeah, I love that. So you’ve navigated lots of careers, multiple master’s degrees, several cultures and languages. How did all those transition shape you today and how you lead and adapt now and what you’re doing now?
Nikki Barua (00:05:46):
Through a lot of those experiences, choices, some intentional, some circumstantial. It really came down to figuring out how to get to the next level and the next level of growth, the next level of success or achievement. In many ways, that early formation story of reinvention became the thing that helped me throughout that process. Each time I had to really determine what is the next chapter of my story yet to be written? And who do I need to become in order to get there? And for that to happen, what do I need to shed? And what do I need to unlearn? And who do I need to become to get to this next version? And much like that video game analogy was really that of, every time you go from level one to level two, your problems actually just get bigger. They don’t get smaller. It’s more complex. You need better strategies, more confidence, better skills, a growth mindset, all of that stuff. And it just keeps testing you until you break through and then you get to the next level. It’s even harder. And as long as you recognize that things getting harder and more challenging, more complex is actually a sign of elevation, you know, of your upward momentum, you And there’s infinite levels you can get to, but we all have a certain timer. The question is, how far do you want to go in the time that you have? And that requires a certain mindset and excitement around the struggle to go through it.
Brian Bell (00:07:12):
So you said video games twice. I have to ask, are you a gamer? And if so, what’s your favorite game?
Nikki Barua (00:07:17):
I’m not a gamer in the context of today’s world, but that was my early passion as a school and college kid. That was the date of video games. That was something that hit me that the idea of levels really excited me because there was a sense of achievement in that. But I love the problems getting bigger. And I don’t know what it was about that, that I had a positive association with it. Often we think when things get harder, there’s something going sideways, something wrong with your life, or maybe you’re just not good enough and a loss of confidence. For me, it became an association of things are getting harder. I’m still playing the game. I’m at the cusp of growth. I’m at getting to the next level. It’s a sign.
Brian Bell (00:08:05):
I would love to see stats on this and maybe somebody in the chat could comment below the article or one of the clips. Maybe this will turn into a clip or beneath one of the posts. What percentage of self-made billionaires are gamers? And I think the percentage is probably going to be higher than you expect because I’m thinking just off the top of my head, all the billionaires I know that are self-made, especially in technology billionaires like Elon, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ed Dove, Larry and Sergey are gamers. They’re all gamers, right?
Brian Bell (00:08:34):
Like Zuckerberg will go on like a bender. He’ll play like civilization like all night.
Nikki Barua (00:08:39):
Well, there’s also a correlation of athletes that are very successful people. But it all comes down to the same thing of you have to master your craft.
Brian Bell (00:08:49):
Yeah.
Nikki Barua (00:08:49):
And mastery just takes dedication and focus and tenacity to really master it. And you have to have a love of the game, not just the winning, but even the losing and the sticking to it. Those are all the traits that just make for great founders.
Brian Bell (00:09:03):
Enjoying the grind.
Nikki Barua (00:09:04):
Enjoying the grind.
Brian Bell (00:09:06):
Staying in the arena. You’re not willing to give up and go do something safe and predictable.
Nikki Barua (00:09:12):
And for me, the scariest parts, frankly, when I look back are the times where it was steady state. And it actually makes me kind of nervous. It’s like, wow, my problems aren’t big enough. Something is wrong here. I’m settling or there’s no growth happening in this state. So this desire to kind of push yourself in ways that catalyze the next version.
Brian Bell (00:09:36):
Yeah. Invite that in. That was always my problem is I would get into a new career or sales or marketing or product or whatever. And I would really throw myself into it for, you know, years, a year or two or three. And then I would be like, okay, well, I’m, I’ve kind of mastered this and I’m kind of done. And I want to kind of move on to something else is what do you, what do you think pushed you from consulting to enterprise to being a founder and what
Nikki Barua (00:10:01):
Yeah. It was exactly when you described your own story. There was something about it that the moment you kind of feel like you’ve solved this problem or achieved a level of mastery, boredom would set in. It’s sort of like, this is not where I, safety and security and certainty are not drivers at all. So it was sort of like, I got to go into the wild unknown. figure out what’s next and solve a meaningful problem that actually helps more people. So for me, the transitions career-wise, starting out as an immigrant who did not know corporate America, that was a huge leap because I knew nothing about a corporate workplace. And building my career in that, navigating what big company leadership looks like, learning all of the traits of being an executive and leading large complex organizations, that was a significant challenge. But when it got to the point where it’s like, okay, I know this now. I know and I could coast for the rest of my life and keep advancing from here. It stopped being interesting. And at the same time, I was also seeing that no matter how much opportunity there was, large companies are like elephants. They move really, really slow. And it was so much waste of resources and just the inertia around outcomes used to frustrate me. And that’s kind of what became the initial trigger from corporate to entrepreneurship was saying, I want to be in the business of making elephants run. I still love enterprise problems. I love large complex problems, but I don’t want, I want to do it in a different way? What if I could figure out a way that helps large companies innovate faster? And that’s kind of what led to my own shift into entrepreneurship of creating something that did not exist before and continuing to do that.
Brian Bell (00:11:43):
And Beyond Curious was working on digital transformation?
Nikki Barua (00:11:47):
Yeah, product innovator. Really, it was like a product incubator in a lab for big companies. And the challenge that we were helping these big companies solve is, you know, they had no shortage of resources and talent and intellect and budgets and all of that. Ideas would just sit on the table for a long time before they ever saw the light of day. And so shipping was one of the biggest challenges. Meanwhile, you look at startups and the rate at which startups ship, right, all the time. And that ethos does not really exist in big companies. And so our entire promise was we’ll get you from idea to, you know, shipping out in six weeks. And the key there wasn’t about faster prototyping or design or development. The key was really driving alignment internally. That was it. Just getting people to agree. Because the moment they agreed, everything became easier.
Nikki Barua (00:08:39):
Well, there’s also a correlation of athletes that are very successful people. But it all comes down to the same thing of you have to master your craft.
Brian Bell (00:08:49):
Yeah.
Nikki Barua (00:08:49):
And mastery just takes dedication and focus and tenacity to really master it. And you have to have a love of the game, not just the winning, but even the losing and the sticking to it. Those are all the traits that just make for great founders.
Brian Bell (00:09:03):
Enjoying the grind.
Nikki Barua (00:09:04):
Enjoying the grind.
Brian Bell (00:09:06):
Staying in the arena. You’re not willing to give up and go do something safe and predictable.
Nikki Barua (00:09:12):
And for me, the scariest parts, frankly, when I look back are the times where it was steady state. And it actually makes me kind of nervous. It’s like, wow, my problems aren’t big enough. Something is wrong here. I’m settling or there’s no growth happening in this state. So this desire to kind of push yourself in ways that catalyze the next version.
Brian Bell (00:09:36):
Yeah. Invite that in. That was always my problem is I would get into a new career or sales or marketing or product or whatever. And I would really throw myself into it for, you know, years, a year or two or three. And then I would be like, okay, well, I’m, I’ve kind of mastered this and I’m kind of done. And I want to kind of move on to something else is what do you, what do you think pushed you from consulting to enterprise to being a founder and what
Nikki Barua (00:10:01):
Yeah. It was exactly when you described your own story. There was something about it that the moment you kind of feel like you’ve solved this problem or achieved a level of mastery, boredom would set in. It’s sort of like, this is not where I, safety and security and certainty are not drivers at all. So it was sort of like, I got to go into the wild unknown. figure out what’s next and solve a meaningful problem that actually helps more people. So for me, the transitions career-wise, starting out as an immigrant who did not know corporate America, that was a huge leap because I knew nothing about a corporate workplace. And building my career in that, navigating what big company leadership looks like, learning all of the traits of being an executive and leading large complex organizations, that was a significant challenge. But when it got to the point where it’s like, okay, I know this now. I know and I could coast for the rest of my life and keep advancing from here. It stopped being interesting. And at the same time, I was also seeing that no matter how much opportunity there was, large companies are like elephants. They move really, really slow. And it was so much waste of resources and just the inertia around outcomes used to frustrate me. And that’s kind of what became the initial trigger from corporate to entrepreneurship was saying, I want to be in the business of making elephants run. I still love enterprise problems. I love large complex problems, but I don’t want, I want to do it in a different way? What if I could figure out a way that helps large companies innovate faster? And that’s kind of what led to my own shift into entrepreneurship of creating something that did not exist before and continuing to do that.
Brian Bell (00:11:43):
And Beyond Curious was working on digital transformation?
Nikki Barua (00:11:47):
Yeah, product innovator. Really, it was like a product incubator in a lab for big companies. And the challenge that we were helping these big companies solve is, you know, they had no shortage of resources and talent and intellect and budgets and all of that. Ideas would just sit on the table for a long time before they ever saw the light of day. And so shipping was one of the biggest challenges. Meanwhile, you look at startups and the rate at which startups ship, right, all the time. And that ethos does not really exist in big companies. And so our entire promise was we’ll get you from idea to, you know, shipping out in six weeks. And the key there wasn’t about faster prototyping or design or development. The key was really driving alignment internally. That was it. Just getting people to agree. Because the moment they agreed, everything became easier.
Brian Bell (00:12:41):
Right. I think that’s why bigger organizations move so slowly is the alignment. I mean, When I went from, it was interesting when I went from Amazon to Microsoft, I went from a pretty flat, you know, organization where decisions were made pretty quickly at Amazon to a lot of decision by committee after committee at Microsoft.
Nikki Barua (00:12:59):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:12:59):
And, you know, it kind of struck me the difference in speed coming from startups and then Amazon, which felt like a big startup. And then Microsoft, which felt like a really large bureaucracy.
Nikki Barua (00:13:08):
Bureaucracy. organizations kind of fall victim to that and how does it kind of kill innovation and i know the cycle just kind of keeps continuing like repeating and it’s not it’s kind of rare for organizations to kind of break through in so many ways i think of it as what’s the uh what’s left of the industrial age and when you think about sort of the old school management hierarchy and the pyramid structures that were built They were built because they were decision makers at the top that hoarded information. And their entire job was about directing other people layer after layer after layer. And the lower you were on the totem pole, your job was simply to execute. Don’t do the thinking. Don’t do the deciding. Somebody out there is controlling your destiny. But that also led to a lot of insecurity around your employment, your power structures, because when you’re really just a doer, not a orchestrator of outcomes, there’s a lot of psychological fear around all of that. And so the best way to protect yourself is to do as directed, as opposed to take risks, as opposed to innovating and all of that. And that same model continues to this day in big corporations. And To me, what’s interesting about the impact of AI beyond the technology part of it, the real impact is how it’s breaking down these kind of models. Those structures will inherently prevent big companies from being valuable, from moving fast, from operating at the speed of light that they need to.
Brian Bell (00:14:37):
So I’d love to get into what you’re working on now, which is Flipwork and happy to cover the journey to Flipwork and what was the aha moment that kind of sparked what that is.
Nikki Barua (00:14:45):
You know, when I look back on my career, the first half of it was really focused on transforming businesses and companies. And the second half was really focused on transforming people, whether it was within large companies or through leadership development and all of that. And what it was a natural sort of evolution building upon those foundations to say, Now it’s the time of really transforming how work gets done because AI is changing work faster than people can change how they work. And we’re still showing up to work with the mental models and playbooks of the past in that sort of industrial age mindset of getting work done, getting tasks done, moving in box to out box, that kind of mentality. And that essentially makes us irrelevant. If we’re still operating in that mindset, it makes us irrelevant. Every individual has to reimagine how they do work, but in order to change how they do work, they have to reinvent their own mindsets and identities first. Because if you’re not shifting who you are, how you create value, how you partner with AI, you’re not going to suddenly just be able to change your workflow and use different tools. You’re still going to use it with that old mindset. And so looking at the challenge that companies are having where they’re investing in the technology, but leaving people behind and the people can’t close that gap of getting ready for this agentic era. That’s what led to the birth of Flipwork and effectively think of us like the operating system for the AI age that’s helping companies reinvent their people, their workflows and the tools so that they become exponentially more capable.
Brian Bell (00:16:21):
That’s awesome. So how do you do that? How do you engage? Is it an actual technology platform? Is it a services organization? How does it work?
Nikki Barua (00:16:30):
So it’s a productized services organization. I think of it like Deloitte needs Duolingo. So instead of it just being about consultants and experts coming in and telling you what you need to change, this is really empowering the individual with an agentic system that helps them co-evolve with the machine, discover what is their zone of genius, discover what they do well and the parts that they need to amplify and the parts they need to let go. And working with teams in changing their approach to any of the functional roles, whether it’s how marketing gets done or sales or product development. Our entire engagement model begins with a diagnostic that helps us identify exactly where those companies have opportunity gaps. where their agentic maturity or readiness is and helps them figure out where should they focus that gives them the biggest ROI. And from that diagnostic, really deploying things in 90-day protocols. Everything is done in 90-day iteration because the point is about continuous reinvention, not some kind of episodic 24-month, consulting transformation project that comes in and like two years later, you’ve changed everything, but the world around you changed all over again. So by doing it in these 90 day cycles, we’re able to roll out changes and innovation in a much faster cycle. And it’s the kind of thing that sticks because it’s really coming inside out. It’s not someone from the top mandating the change. It’s an individual discovering where they can create the most value and how they can move to higher level work rather than task-based work. Ultimately, the real change that we’re helping companies enable is move their employees from doers of tasks to orchestrators of outcomes. When you can shift that, now you’re unlocking something pretty significant in terms of the shift of capacity that you have.
Brian Bell (00:18:19):
Yeah, I’m guessing that IC’s individual contributors probably have the toughest time transitioning because they’re used to kind of pushing pixels around and software stacks of like tasks versus managers. They’re kind of used to saying, let’s go do this. And then the AI in this case would just go do that and come back and say, here’s the outcome. Here’s the report. Here’s the task for your review boss. Do you kind of find that?
Nikki Barua (00:18:44):
It’s interesting you brought that up because it’s actually both are challenged in different ways. For individual contributors, it’s a question of where do you derive your sense of worth? Because if your sense of worth is based on identities, like I’m a hard worker, I put in 12 hour days, that’s what makes me awesome. That’s why people value me or my company. doesn’t wanna lose me. Well, what happens when a machine can do all of that and doesn’t require 12 hours? What about you? So redefining your source of worth and your contribution is important to figure out what parts in this new context, what are you bringing to the table? And often it’s the things that make you uniquely human that a machine can do, right? But it’s shifting to that, not just mechanically, but shifting to that psychologically. That is where we found the biggest struggle and the biggest sort of resistance, if you will, not because they’re resistant to technology, the resistance to letting go of their old self. That’s the challenge that individuals face. The manager thing is really interesting because so much of middle management is about sort of directing people, right? Like you’re controlling, you’re directing, you’re holding, driving accountability, you’re measuring KPIs and all of that. What happens when your teams are not just humans but it’s agents as well what does that look like so you actually need more nuance so managerial skills are shifting from not just directing and managing to actually contextualizing and clarifying how do you provide the why not just the what and leave your teams to figure out the how so that becoming the orchestrator and the context and the meaning maker if you will That is the shift for management skills. We’re going to see a shrinking of the management, the middle management layer, not because we don’t need them, but because we need a different kind of profile and nuance for that kind of skill set.
Brian Bell (00:20:39):
Right. And maybe you just don’t need as many managers in the future. You kind of need more context givers to the AI.
Nikki Barua (00:20:46):
Exactly. Right. Which is a different kind of skill. And providing clarity to the teams that you lead so they can figure out the answers. But you’re really sort of clearing the way, if you will. You’re providing the context that helps them understand why, letting them figure it out, and then clearing the way when they run into teams. any obstacles. That becomes your role, which is very different from driving accountability and controlling and overseeing. Oversight is not that valuable. If it’s a question of divvying up instructions, well, a machine can do that.
Brian Bell (00:21:18):
What are some concrete examples or stories that you’re seeing in practice in this area? I’d love to kind of hear how you’re seeing this kind of unfold as organizations are Layering AI and agents into the processes and work to be done inside organizations. I see it at the startup level, but startups are always on the tip of the spear. I’d love to hear it from the larger company perspective.
Nikki Barua (00:21:42):
Yeah, it’s really interesting in some of the key themes that we’ve been seeing. We work with mostly Fortune 500 companies. So these are very large, complex organizations. Few themes are not necessarily all connected, but I’ll share some of the top lines that are interesting. First, the executives in the C-suite are under a ton of pressure because the boards are asking them, hey, how are we using AI? What’s the plan with AI? They don’t know what the answer should be, but there’s tremendous pressure that it needs to be applied for something.
Brian Bell (00:22:18):
Yeah, it’s kind of like, what’s your internet strategy in the 90s?
Nikki Barua (00:22:19):
Right, yeah, exactly. What’s our AI strategy? What’s our AI vision? Meanwhile, these executives are trying to figure out the right answer themselves because Some of them have the attitude of like, well, it’s an IT problem, which to me is like, okay, if you think it’s an IT problem, you’ve already failed because it is definitely not an IT problem. If you’re thinking of it as just an IT issue, right? If you don’t consider it as a catalyst for transforming your entire business model and your people and culture, you’re going to get it wrong. There are others that are waiting to see when there’s more clarity and less uncertainty. So there’s a little bit of a wait and watch. Let the dust settle. And maybe we’re still experimental, but we’re not ready to deploy a very clear vision or a very clear implementation strategy. The ones that are at the leading edge to me are the ones that are expressing with vulnerability to say, hey, I don’t have the answers yet, but what’s important is that we don’t just wait and watch, that we actually start engaging in some way. Let’s do some pilots. Let’s do something that gets us engaged and sort of learn by doing. So there’s that at the executive level. What’s happening on the ground level, unlike other technologies where I’ve seen tech transformation over the years, where often in big companies, there’s a lot of resistance. I’m not seeing that this time. I’m actually seeing a ton of enthusiasm and excitement because I think people are generally kind of used to the tools so that they recognize the value of it. But because there’s often not clear governance or a pathway that’s defined, there’s a ton of shadow AI usage and kind of Wild Wild West at the ground level of things that are playing out and not enough usage beyond just generative AI. I’m not seeing as much agentic use and certainly not enough in terms of readiness yet in terms of seeing it as a true organizational capability building. Like how might this fundamentally change our moat, for example? Traditional moats are kind of eroding pretty quickly. Well, what does this look like for us to leverage this in a whole different context as a strategic vehicle, as opposed to a technical tool? I mean, to me, it’s the same mindset as saying, if you think the only reason Blockbuster did not become Netflix is because it had less compute, I mean, that’s not the reason. It was a complete reimagination, right? And so getting to that point where you see this as a catalyst for true reinvention, not just a technical leverage.
Brian Bell (00:24:49):
Yeah. You know, and it reminds me of like the old phrase, I think it’s not the Peter principle, but it’s, what’s the other one where if a man’s salary depends on him not understanding the problem. Yeah.
Nikki Barua (00:25:01):
He won’t understand the problem.
Brian Bell (00:25:03):
Yeah. Because, you know, to disrupt. Incentives drive behavior.
Nikki Barua (00:25:07):
Yeah, it’s like you’re disincentivized to disrupt your own kind of empire building inside of organizations, right? Where you’re like, oh, maybe if I implement AI here, the powers that be, you know, the SVPs, the C-levels are going to take my 100% org and it’ll be a 50% org and they’ll reallocate those 50 people to somewhere else. Because if you think about like what’s happening in engineering, that’s where it kind of, it’s being felt first, right? With tools like Cursor and Winsurf. Enabling senior engineers especially to move ever more quickly because they have the context and the experience that it’s kind of leading to, I think, job losses for entry-level engineers. So you’re seeing more and more output from fewer and fewer engineers.
Brian Bell (00:25:49):
Yeah. Now, I wonder if there’ll be a Jevons paradox there economically, but I think maybe inside organizations, you’re kind of, you haven’t seen kind of the co-pilot kind of tools like Cursor really deployed across different functional areas yet. I think Harvey and Legal comes to mind.
Brian Bell (00:26:05):
We have one. In our portfolio, Solve Intelligence that does this for IPs and patents.
Nikki Barua (00:26:10):
Yeah, they’re growing very fast.
Brian Bell (00:26:11):
Pat on my investor back here. You know, I just don’t think we’ve seen the full proliferation of those tools around organizations. It takes five or 10 years typically, especially to It’s because it’s the navigation that makes it so complex, right? Because in a startup environment or even a small business or an individual using it, it’s plug and play. You don’t have to navigate politics and fiefdom and power structures to get around it. Anything implementation and change in a big organization is such a complex environment to make it through because on one hand, it’s sort of whose decision-making authority is it? On the other hand, if something goes wrong, whose neck is on the line? Those considerations have got nothing to do with the technical capabilities of the tool itself. It’s all of these other things to solve, which is why in the absence of clear vision and governance, almost nothing takes off and very little sticks.
Nikki Barua (00:27:05):
So what we’re seeing right now, to me, 2025 was the year of sort of experimentation, if you will, just larger companies kind of experimenting and some of it through pilots. Some of it through just testing and learning and exploring what’s out there, but no real commitment. 2026, my hope is that it becomes a year of some concrete implementation, even if it’s a small scale, but actually committing to some real change.
Brian Bell (00:27:33):
You said the most powerful technology on earth is still the human being. I love that. In a world obsessed with model performance and using AI at all costs. How do you see the role of human capabilities evolving?
Nikki Barua (00:27:44):
Moving from human doing to human being, the last century has been so much about doing that the industrial era really turned us into doers that operate with instruction and are often afraid to operate without instruction. industrial age kind of side effects we kind of have this overhang from the industrial right and we’re still operating like we’re on a factory floor even if we’re on the top floor of a high-rise in a modern financial services company we still operate with a factory floor mentality waiting to be told what the work is working within the guardrails of that sandbox and and being production machines in that to me the it’s how we’re educated still too
Brian Bell (00:28:25):
Yeah, exactly.
Nikki Barua (00:28:26):
I mean, the academic environment is so structured and episodic, right? There’s a beginning and end to learning. And then you go off and do your thing and you keep referencing the old knowledge and not much changes. Everything is very structured. What I see as the transition or evolution of human capability is that It’s about high agency. It’s about, you know, creativity and curiosity and being able to really define our own path and create value in what makes us uniquely us.
Brian Bell (00:29:01):
Yeah. So what are, you touched a little bit on this, but what are some of the most dangerous blind spots leaders have as they adopt these AI tools?
Nikki Barua (00:29:10):
The thing that I’m seeing most commonly is looking at the technology as a, there’s a lot of the shiny object syndrome that’s going on. Something about this technology is going to solve all of our problems and really not considering the human in the context of the transformation that’s required. surface level implementation, that it’s not really thinking about the entire context. And it would be a travesty to leave people behind while we keep doubling down on the tech, because the co-evolution together is where all the power lies.
Brian Bell (00:29:46):
If every company becomes AI driven, what’s the new differentiator? And I think I’m seeing this a little bit in my early stage tech investing, right? That You know, it used to be, hey, we could build the tech better than anybody else. And it doesn’t seem to be as big of a differentiator anymore.
Nikki Barua (00:30:02):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:30:04):
What are you seeing in large organizations?
Nikki Barua (00:30:06):
Very similar thing of, you know, so much of what differentiated one company from the other used to be something that’s proprietary, right? Like something that they built or something that they owned, an asset. I see the differentiator being around traits like your adaptability, because if everything’s changing, it’s your ability to adapt differently. And the things that represent your culture, because with big companies, these are behemoth machines. They’re massive organizations with 200,000 employees. It’s not what assets you own or what buildings you own or machines you’ve created or what software you’ve built. It’s how quickly can you, how agile and adaptive are you to that and what makes it distinct that will stand the test of any kind of change that happens.
Brian Bell (00:30:51):
Yeah. And we’ve been through so many paradigm shifts now. This is like the sixth major platform shift, I think, going from AI. And I think it’s telling if you look back at the Fortune 500 in particular. What’s the average tenure?
Nikki Barua (00:31:02):
It used to be... The CEO tenure, I mean?
Brian Bell (00:31:08):
No, not the CEO. The actual time that a company spends in the Fortune 500 once they make the Fortune 500.
Nikki Barua (00:31:14):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:31:15):
I think 100 years ago, it was pretty long, like 40, 50 years. And now I think it’s down to 15 or 12.
Nikki Barua (00:31:21):
Yeah, it is supposed to be less than a decade going forward. So you’re going to see them fall off. But that’s exactly why, right? It doesn’t matter where they start off. One wave of disruption is enough to wipe them out. And next thing you know, all of that value creation goes out the window. And despite that kind of market share, despite that kind of size, it’s not enough to be resilient through that change. And the best companies that we see continue to make it through that are the ones that are just relentlessly innovating and staying at the cutting edge of that.
Brian Bell (00:31:54):
I mean, that’s why to me, Microsoft is so fascinating because there’s such a massive giant that has been around for so long. And the fact that they have pivoted and moved this giant organization through so many massive- They missed mobile, right? And then so when cloud came along, they’re like, we’re not missing this. We’re putting everything to not miss this. And then AI came along and thankfully they had Satya there and they’re like, we’re not missing this either. Right.
Nikki Barua (00:32:19):
So, which kind of creates the arms race, right, of AI and investment in capital expenditures, which I think Benedict Evans just wrote about in his slide deck. I don’t know if you’ve reviewed that. I wrote an article on it a couple days ago. Really good.
Brian Bell (00:32:33):
Yeah. I’m curious from your standpoint, though, your focus on early state startups and just helping innovators take their products to market and all of that. On the other hand, you have these giant corporations that are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, it’s turning out to be kind of a monopolistic market, right, with the ones at the top just big.
Brian Bell (00:32:53):
exponentially growing it’s not even remotely linear anymore what does that look like for early state startups is there do you see a path or is it are they just growing to become a feature in a bigger company or an angry hire yeah it could be i don’t know like open ai is worth something like five six hundred billion now you know they’re a new one anthropics worth hundreds of billions we have a multi-polar foundational model competition
Nikki Barua (00:33:18):
Now the question becomes like, okay, well, Google’s coming in and they have superior distribution, right? Across all these surface areas, same with Microsoft and to a lesser extent, Amazon. And so it’s really a question of like, okay, can you become this billion, $10 billion company before they crush you, right? That’s kind of the question we ask ourselves as early stage investors.
Brian Bell (00:33:38):
And so I’m pretty bullish on vertical AI agentic solutions. Right. It’s like, Oh, we’re building this for doctor’s offices. You know, like, well, Google is not going to go build that. Right. Maybe some super intelligent AI that can do anything. We’ll do that in the future, but that could be, you know, five or 10 years away. And so there’s probably some there there before, you know, they get crushed versus like, Oh, okay. We’re going to build a new Gmail, you know, with AI. Well, you know, yeah. That’s going to be hard, right? Because Google, they’ve been moving pretty slow on the AI stuff inside of Gmail, but they’re starting to release, they just released suggested replies. I don’t know if you’ve seen that.
Nikki Barua (00:34:21):
That’s getting better and better. It’s getting more context.
Brian Bell (00:34:22):
Yeah. And so it’s going to be hard to really kind of unseat. And, you know, I think- I mean, the distribution advantage is where it’s at. And so unless you capture the same kind of advantage in some underserved niche, you know, and- Yeah, and you have to be at the right level of the stack at the right time in the platform shift, right? And so I’ve already missed as an investor, the foundational model stuff. I would have had to been an angel investor back in like, 2015 to 2018. And I didn’t really start angel investing until about 2018. So I kind of missed that. And then you start, it whips up the stack. You’re at the platform ship kind of whips up here. And you start looking at the networking layer, the security layer. Then you’ve got the platform layer. So I did get into quite a few platform companies like Bland AI is a portfolio company. It’s a voice AI platform. And then you start getting up into the application layer stuff, which is like the Gmail kind of stuff. But up at the application layer, you got to make sure you’re not too horizontal. You got to be vertical enough where the incumbent, you know, trillion dollar companies aren’t going to crush you.
Nikki Barua (00:35:23):
And I think on kind of even at the hardware layer, like NVIDIA, like first $5 trillion company recently, But it’s also driving lots of innovation across. Like Google has their own TPUs that compete with GPUs. So they’re not beholden to NVIDIA. And they’re starting to license those TPUs out and sell them to other providers like Anthropic. You know, Amazon has their own chip and so on. AMD has a motion in the space. I’m reasonably confident capitalism kind of works itself out, right? Markets kind of work themselves out. Huge profit margins drive lots of innovation to kind of eat away at those profit margins. And it’s hard to maintain, you know, your lead forever.
Brian Bell (00:36:01):
I mean, Google was like kind of the best business in history. Just printing money.
Nikki Barua (00:36:05):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:36:06):
With search engine ads and AdWords and stuff.
Nikki Barua (00:36:09):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:36:09):
Now, I mean, they’re speaking to elephants dancing, right? Like you said earlier, right? They’re dancing over there right now.
Nikki Barua (00:36:16):
Yeah. I mean, for a bit, it seemed like they were behind and, you know, they went through a period of a lot of doubt in the market about them, but the recovery...
Brian Bell (00:36:27):
Yeah, they’re catching up. They’re the second leading, I think, LLM now in terms of market share and daily active users. And they’re just going to continue to flex that distribution muscle through all their different surface areas and products and services.
Nikki Barua (00:36:39):
So I think every platform shift, you get one or two new really big winners. NVIDIA for sure, OpenAI, maybe to a lesser extent Anthropik, and a bunch of others. And then you just... It’s a thousand flowers blooming. I think it’s like one of the best. And I wrote an article on this recently. It’s like the best time to be an early stage investor because there’s just so much stuff out there. So much low hanging fruit that you can take AI and agents and apply it to old business processes, claims processing and dental. Oh, okay. The most boring businesses and the most boring industries are so ripe right now. And I really believe it’s the golden age of entrepreneurship because it’s easier than ever before to take your idea and do something with it. You’re not gated necessarily by tons of capital or tons of headcount. I mean, 15 years ago or 18 years ago when I was starting out, I mean, there were just a lot of gatekeepers, a lot of limitations, resource limitations that you had to kind of get smart about and figure out how to make. That’s not there anymore. But it also means there’s a lot more people stepping into it. So you better kind of have clarity around your value prop and your differentiation and keep adapting quickly. But there’s It’s just so much out there. So much stuff to do right now.
Brian Bell (00:37:53):
Yeah.
Nikki Barua (00:37:54):
Yeah. The boring complex industries to me are the most fun because it’s just such a ripe, you know, open market for doing so much.
Brian Bell (00:38:02):
Yeah. So on back to what you’re excited about over the next five years in your line of work and what you’re doing, but looking at your crystal ball, what are you excited about three to five years? It’s hard to kind of think beyond that, I think, but what are you excited about?
Nikki Barua (00:38:15):
Yeah. So I’ve spent a large part of my career in corporate strategy and innovation and large-scale corporate strategy and all of that. And the thing that has been more of an intellectual sort of excitement for me is seeing the evolution of the org model itself. We were talking about the industrial age and sort of how businesses and organizations got designed and it was a pyramid because information had to flow from the top down and direction had to go top down. That model just does not make sense in this era and you need structures that look less like a pyramid and more like a neural network. Org design shifting means you have tighter cross-functional teams that are like Navy SEAL teams that are self-directed, that are fast moving, that are loosely connected. Instead of being like a Titanic, they’re more like a hundred speed boats heading the same direction really, really fast. What that would unleash in terms of innovation and product ideas and speed to market would be really exciting to see. That’s the piece that I’m super pumped about.
Brian Bell (00:39:21):
Well, let’s wrap up with a quick rapid fire. What’s a reinvention moment from the past year that surprised you?
Nikki Barua (00:39:25):
For myself, it was kind of going from expert mode to rookie mode, that there was no other way to be than go back to being a rookie and like being open-minded and learning and frankly, letting go of a lot of the stuff I knew or thought I knew before.
Brian Bell (00:39:39):
Which book outside your own most shaped how you think about change?
Nikki Barua (00:39:43):
Atomic habits. Because if you can figure out how to build new habits or shed old habits, you can figure out how to adapt to anything else outside of yourself. Changing ourselves is one of the hardest things to do. And I feel like it’s such a practical guide for doing exactly that.
Brian Bell (00:39:58):
It’s probably something to select for when I look at founders now. Like how often have you changed?
Nikki Barua (00:40:01):
That’s interesting, the adaptability.
Brian Bell (00:40:05):
Yeah,
Nikki Barua (00:40:05):
I think in my hiring focus, it’s a lot of what I’ve really prioritized over all else because knowledge or expertise or even experience gained, it means very little when things are changing. I want to look at what’s your rate of learning? you know what how quickly are you able to and that that’s that rate of learning isn’t just about agility adaptability it’s also a certain kind of cognitive ability that you need and if you can do that at speed and and keep building nuance and bring something original to the table that that’s a winner skill set
Brian Bell (00:40:41):
what’s a common piece of leadership advice you think is outdated
Nikki Barua (00:40:44):
I hated this from the beginning, but I’ll say it. It’s definitely feels outdated now is follow your passion because in a highly competitive environment, if you’re following your passion and nobody gives a crap about what you’re passionate about, it’s creating zero value or zero impact in the world.
Brian Bell (00:41:00):
Yeah. I say follow your like, you know, more than follow your passion. Like if you’re interested in something, you’ll get more passionate about it over time or bored of it and move on.
Nikki Barua (00:41:10):
Yeah. That’s a great way to think about it. Focus on the reps and either you’ll grow to love it because there’s joy in the journey or you’ll hate it and you’ll know that’s not for you. But if it’s just passionate, there’s no value for anyone else. I’m passionate about video games, but I can’t sit here and make money on Twitch. Nobody’s going to watch a grown man play video games.
Brian Bell (00:41:34):
What’s an overlooked metric founders and big company CEOs should track about their teams?
Nikki Barua (00:41:40):
Actually, just what we were talking about, I would say that the speed of mastering new skills, of the speed of growth, not just growth in general, which is growth is something that traditional performance reviews, they track that, right? How much should you grow? But we don’t often put the denominator of time on it. And really tracking that as what distinguishes someone’s ability to go into any unknown territory and figure it out very quickly and get to mastery level. That is a superpower.
Brian Bell (00:42:12):
Awesome. What’s an early career belief you had then, but you now firmly reject it?
Nikki Barua (00:42:16):
Effort will lead to success. And I think some of it is, I would say, probably an immigrant mentality. You know, like you’re taught like hard work, keep your head down, work hard and you’ll become successful. That does not replace the need for hard work, certainly, but by itself is not enough. There’s a lot more to bring to the table beyond just that. And if it’s just effort, then well, machines can do that.
Brian Bell (00:42:40):
If you had to teach a masterclass tomorrow, what would be the first lesson?
Nikki Barua (00:42:44):
How to unlearn.
Brian Bell (00:42:45):
Like that. Last question. What’s the boldest prediction you’re willing to make about the future of work?
Nikki Barua (00:42:49):
The end of full-time jobs.
Brian Bell (00:42:53):
Yeah.
Nikki Barua (00:42:54):
They’re totally dated. We put people in, you know.
Brian Bell (00:42:58):
Yeah, there’s no need to work five or six days a week. It’s just...
Nikki Barua (00:43:02):
Well, even the definition of a full-time job where you are defined by a resume on one page as opposed to the richness of the experiences and perspectives that a human being brings. And then you’re put in a box to work nine to five in a very defined container for a role and a skill set in a department and kept that. I see a future where it’s about different types of capabilities and experiences of people coming together, kind of like a Navy SEAL team, right? They formed and unformed depending on the outcome you’re looking for, as opposed to, again, that very constrained definition of you are a director of marketing and you will only do marketing, but there might be so many other ways to leverage that talent and also not looking at it as just full-time employee kind of idea of what if it was just truly like a gig economy of different types of experts coming together and co-creating for an outcome.
Brian Bell (00:44:01):
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like open source software projects, right? You’re not just dedicated to one open source software project. You might work on six or maybe a dozen of them.
Nikki Barua (00:44:12):
Yeah, and especially in large corporations, there’s so much shunning of this idea of side hustles or other pursuits beyond your main job. But in so many ways, that kind of feeds your creativity or gives you outlets for other interests. But to me, what I mean by the end of the full-time job is more the end of static roles. That we are bringing our multifaceted personalities and experiences and interests to solve very specific outcomes, not just putting in time and collecting a paycheck, but specific outcomes. And in some ways, Hollywood, if you really think about the movie industry, it’s kind of operated that way. There’s a specific film project and different experts come together and they do this and then they disband and they go on to the next thing.
Brian Bell (00:44:54):
Well, Nikki, I really enjoyed the conversation. Learned a lot. Thanks for coming on.
Nikki Barua (00:44:57):
Thank you for inviting me, Brian. Great to be here.
