The New Currency of the AI Era

I’ve been sitting with a piece by Aditya Agarwal, co-founder of South Park Commons, that made me pause and reflect. Read it here (The Information, paywalled). It’s nominally about his personal reckoning with Claude as an engineering tool, but the real meat of it is about talent and what we now actually value in people.

Three things stood out.

First: In hiring trials at companies within his community, years of experience showed zero correlation with adaptability to AI tools. What did predict success? A builder’s disposition: cool personal websites, side projects, an obvious love of making things. FAANG pedigree and name-brand universities predicted almost nothing. Another company started giving coding interview tasks that were intentionally too long to complete by hand. The result was a clean filter. Not a 10% gap between those who used AI tools daily versus those who merely read about them, but closer to 10x.

Second: The divide isn’t generational. It’s dispositional. This hits home for me. At Analog Ventures, I’ve seen interns who struggle to integrate AI into their workflow meaningfully, and senior operators who’ve woven it seamlessly into how they think and work. Age has nothing to do with it. Willingness to change operates on its own axis, independent of years in the industry.

Third, and this is the one that really landed:

“We spent decades building a culture that worships credentials and experience. Those things aren’t worthless, but they’re no longer sufficient. The new currency is adaptability, and unlike a Stanford degree, it’s available to everyone.”

This is something I’ve been observing through my own lens as an investor. The founders I’m most excited about aren’t the ones with the most polished credentials. They’re the ones who seem constitutionally unable to stop building, who treat every new tool as something to be explored rather than debated.

The truth is, the profession of venture capital is itself not immune to this. The way we source, evaluate, and support companies is changing fast. AI is compressing the timelines between idea and product, between hypothesis and validation. Founders are moving faster. The question is whether investors are keeping pace, or whether we’re reading about the tools instead of using them.

Adaptability, it turns out, is not a soft skill. In this era, it might just be the most important one.

P.S: I’ve been building and experimenting with deploying AI Agents at our firm. I can’t wait to share it with the wider world. I’m learning so much and it feels great to be building products again.