ETL is Dead, Management is Overrated, and the Content Wars Are Just Beginning
The tech world loves to cling to old playbooks.
But if you look closely, three massive shifts are staring us in the face.
Let’s call them what they are 👇
⸻
The Death of ETL (and the Rise of AI-Native Orchestration)
For 20+ years, we’ve been brainwashed into believing that ETL pipelines are the holy grail of analytics.
Extract. Transform. Load. Repeat.
Here’s the truth: LLMs don’t care about your pipelines.
They can query across silos, interpret messy data, and generate insights on-demand without you spending months modeling schemas.
— Schema-first → Context-first
— Transform-heavy → Prompt-driven
— Data warehouses → AI copilots
Look at Databricks Genie. It’s basically telling every data engineer: “Stop babysitting pipelines. Let AI handle the orchestration.”
ETL isn’t “evolving.” It’s being dismantled in real time.
And the people who cling to it?
They’re the new COBOL programmers of this generation.
The $10M → $50M Trap: Stop Worshiping “Professional Management”
Every startup book preaches:
“Once you hit $10M ARR, you need to bring in VPs, SVPs, a CRO, and layers of professional management.”
Bullshit.
In AI and frontier tech, loading up on expensive execs is the fastest way to kill momentum.
— More VPs = more process.
— More process = slower decisions.
— Slower decisions = lost revenue.
Customers don’t care about your leadership offsite. They care that you ship fast, solve their problems, and stay ahead of competitors.
Scaling doesn’t require a bloated org chart. It requires:
— Small, autonomous pods that own revenue outcomes.
— Operators who execute, not PowerPoint generals.
— Speed over politics.
Maybe the real trap isn’t scaling revenue.
Maybe the real trap is believing you need big-company management before you have a big-company problem.
The Content Wars: Canva, Adobe, ChatGPT, Google, Meta
We’re about to see the biggest creative platform war since Microsoft vs Netscape.
— Canva turned design into a playground for SMBs.
— Gamma made decks idiot-proof.
— Adobe is clinging to its pro empire with Firefly AI.
— ChatGPT became the horizontal assistant everyone plugs into.
— Google just launched its own AI image creator, tied into Search and Workspace.
— Meta is stuffing AI-generated media directly into Instagram and Facebook.
Who wins? Probably not the “best product.”
Winners will be decided by distribution.
— Canva has SMB lock-in.
— Adobe has pros.
— Google and Meta have billions of daily users.
— OpenAI has the “assistant layer” sitting across everything.
This won’t be about features. It’ll be about who controls the funnel where creation starts.
TL;DR — The Brutal Truth
— ETL is dying. LLMs are the new pipelines.
— Professional management is overrated. Pods > PowerPoints.
— The content wars will be won by distribution, not creativity.
The only question left is this:
👉 Are you playing the old game, or are you ready to admit the rules have changed
?