TECH TEAMS TUESDAY · A Building Tech Teams publication
01 · THE PATTERN
This issue is all about stacking.
Skill stacking: adding AI tools to human expertise to amplify what a person could do alone.
Superpower stacking: combining two contradictory superpowers that are not meant to exist in one person. That combination can create exceptional founders, leaders and employees.
Agent stacking: one marketer managing 3,000 agents to become the 100x CMO.
The other commonality across these stacking stories is that the human remains central to growing any team or company.
My read from the recruitment seat: some people are becoming sick of AI and the constant conversation around it. That’s understandable. But the benefits are appearing across industries, and a head-in-the-sand approach won’t play out well in the long term.
We are still early, and everyone has an opportunity to upskill individually through skill stacking, or reshape their teams through superpower and agent stacking.
02 · THE MOVES
1. Why hasn’t AI increased unemployment?
Peter McCrory runs economics at Anthropic, and this week he published a personal essay arguing that AI has caused no material rise in unemployment. His argument is based on US data, which strengthens his position because, as he says, AI adoption is high in the US, it’s the world’s largest economy, and traditionally the US is fast to facilitate labour-displacing technologies. (Peter’s essay on X) The technology trends seen in the US often play out in Australia months down the track.
The overall reason AI hasn’t caused mass unemployment, according to Peter: “So far, AI is both skill-biased and labor-augmenting. It complements domain expertise. It relies on humans in the loop to direct and evaluate the most complex work. And it rewards AI proficiency.”
He was careful to say that this could change as agents become more capable. For now, however, AI is automating parts of jobs and amplifying people with complementary experience.
He went on to say: “The future is still quite uncertain. Model capabilities are advancing rapidly, and AI systems may soon be able to autonomously develop their own successors. More generally intelligent AI systems could lead to labor displacement that hasn’t yet materialized.”
What I see day to day in recruitment is not significant AI-driven layoffs, but something quieter: an engineer leaves, the role is not replaced, and the existing team absorbs the work.
For leaders: another interesting read this week is Dan Shapiro’s “0%, 50%, or 200%” blog, in which he describes the decisions leaders face when managing teams that have become more productive with AI.
For tech professionals: we’re seeing software engineering demand improve, and the engineers in demand are those who are proficient with AI. It’s the same story in other technology roles. AI amplifies output, and companies are looking for employees who understand the tools, their limitations, and the practices that improve the quality of their output.
2. Two superpowers that are contradictory
Joon Sung Park is the Stanford researcher behind Simile, the startup building AI that simulates how real humans behave. He has raised about $300 million in 14 months. This week, he sat down with 20VC, one of my favourite podcasts, for a conversation that included a sharp 15-minute section on team building. It starts at around the 32-minute mark.
The most interesting point for me was that Park looks for people with two superpowers that should not logically coexist. An exceptional programmer who is also exceptional at mathematics is impressive, but those abilities are correlated. His line from the episode: “Where I found things to be particularly compelling is if people have two superpowers that’s really contradictory.”
Harry Stebbings gave the example of world-class CMOs: people who combine rigorous, scientific thinking with creative artistry and imagination. Either ability is valuable. Finding both in one person is rare.
It’s the same theme I wrote about in Issue 4 of the Building Tech Teams newsletter, when I shared that builder-executives are getting paid like professional athletes. The outliers at the moment are the people who have superpowers in two different areas. In that case, it was executive and commercial acumen combined with the ability to build technically.
Other team-building advice Park shared overlapped with what Claudia Barriga-Larriviere and I discussed on the Building Tech Teams podcast a fortnight ago. Park explains that “your team has to be balanced”, and that you need to hire for where your team is lacking, where the gaps are, and what success will require before those gaps become obvious.
Claudia has a similar take when looking for balance and gaps. Her first question to any hiring manager is whether the team needs glue or grease, cohesion or speed. It’s about understanding what the team is missing, rather than simply hiring against a set of skills.
For leaders: in another section of the podcast, Park talked about attracting in-demand talent. While he couldn’t compete on salary alone, he said the best people are often driven by vision, and you need to be able to share that vision and inspire them to come and work with you.
For tech professionals: two other core skills Park looks for are “an extreme degree of ownership” and “the ability to reinvent yourself”. These are skills anyone can learn. If you’re feeling stuck, the first step may be to own that. Second, look at how you can stack skills to grow into the roles you want.
3. ClickUp wants one person to be the entire marketing department
The job ad is real. ClickUp is hiring a Chief Marketing Officer. One human. Reporting directly to founder and CEO Zeb Evans, paying between US$500,000 and US$1 million. The role covers brand, positioning, campaigns, creative, social, email and every content pipeline the company runs. No resume, no cover letter, no degree. Candidates submit two videos: one walking through a marketing system they built, and one walking through work they reviewed and killed. Behind the ad sits the context that makes it more than a stunt. ClickUp cut 22 percent of its staff in May and now runs roughly 3,000 internal AI agents alongside about 1,000 employees. (State of Brand)
It’s the two-superpower idea again: the brand marketer and the builder. Or, in the language of the job ad, a “builder with taste”.
At first glance, this looks like the opposite of what Peter McCrory described in Move 1. In reality, it’s the same model taken to an extreme: one highly capable human, amplified by AI. ClickUp is still hiring for judgement, taste and the ability to distinguish great work from garbage. The agents produce. The human decides.
For leaders: the useful question from the job ad is about your review loop. When work gets rejected in your team, does anything downstream change, or do you just get a revised draft? Pick one function, rebuild one workflow end to end, prove it, then take on the next. That sequence beats the “we have to be AI-native” moonshot every time.
For tech professionals: I think videos in the job application process are the way of the future. I don’t necessarily think video submissions will become standard at the application stage. But interviews are increasingly moving towards candidates opening a laptop and showing what they’ve built, why they built it, and how they made the decisions behind it. Even when it’s not a laptop-based show and tell, it’s becoming more common to talk through what you’ve built or how you’d build something. It’s the modern version of the whiteboard session that dominated technical interviews over the past five years.
Can you build a system, and can you explain why you killed something it produced? The second skill is the rarer one that trips more candidates up during an interview.
03 · FROM THE INDEX
One read a week from the AI Jobs Index, the live tracker I run at aijobsindex.com.au. Data as of 2 August 2026, re-checked on send morning.
The number that refuses to move: 3,610. That’s still the number of Australian jobs cut in announcements where the company itself named AI as a driver. It hasn’t changed in a month, and this week a Financial Times analysis suggested one reason why.
The FT looked at US tech companies that cited AI as a factor in job cuts and found their shares underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10 percent in the 30 trading days after the announcement.
Monday.com joined the list last week, cutting around 20 percent of its staff as part of an AI-first restructure, one of more than 20 companies to name AI this year. The market has started reading “AI did it” as a cost-cutting exercise rather than a sign of a company thriving. (TechCrunch)
Australia often follows the US on major technology and employment trends, so we may still see more explicitly AI-linked layoffs in Australia. For now, however, the US market is indicating that naming AI as a contributing factor to a restructure can have a negative effect on share price.
04 · PEOPLE: THE RIGHT ROLE, FOR NOW
When I advise professionals on their next move, or help them make sense of their last one, I often return to the same idea: the right role for them now.
Someone coming out of burnout may not be suited to becoming CTO of a scaling startup, no matter how exciting the company is.
For someone else, a sideways move, or even a backward one on paper, may provide exposure to a new industry, leadership team or set of skills.
And leaving after two years does not mean the decision was wrong. It may have been exactly the right role when you accepted it, before you and the company moved onto different trajectories.
In an ideal situation, the right role for now grows internally at the same company. Promotions happen, responsibilities grow, and the company and individual continue providing value to one another. But looking too far into the future when assessing a potential opportunity can also be the wrong move.
This week, it was refreshing to see the honesty from Ben Hurst, who stepped away from the CEO role at HotDoc, the company he founded fourteen years ago. It was no longer the right role for him, even as CEO of the company he founded.
“However, as we’ve moved out of the startup phase, I’ve felt less energised by a role that demands more from me as a CEO and less as Founder.”
“I’ve come to realise that I’m no longer the best person to lead this company – it’s time for a break. I love HotDoc. I love the people. But I’ve fallen out of love with the job.”
He built a company he loves, then stepped aside with a succession plan that leaves HotDoc in a strong position. A classy move from a successful founder.
05 · WHAT I’M BUILDING
ClickUp posted the ad for a one-person marketing department this week, and reading it gave me a little sense of justification for what I’ve been building this year: a significantly smaller, less complicated system of agents, skills and scheduled tasks to do my research for me.
The marketing system behind this newsletter did its research phase on Friday. It opened 65 email threads across my Gmail intel labels, read a dozen feeds, pulled the live Index numbers and scored every story it found, then staged the top eleven candidates for the issue. It’s not fully automated yet. I added two pieces myself, the 20VC podcast and the 100x marketer story, which I found during my normal browsing throughout the week.
The same system checks every fact against a source it actually opened and applies my rules about the topics I care about and what I will or will not cover before anything reaches me. My main job was the second video from the ClickUp ad: review and kill. Four stories survived, and you just read them.
Claude helped me build the system. It doesn’t choose my argument. I write the final copy. I’m nowhere near 3,000 agents, and some days it feels like the system is broken. I still have to use my judgement about what I want to write, what I hope readers will value, and where the system needs to improve.
The part that has not moved an inch is the part ClickUp’s ad calls “taste”. The system scans, researches and structures information for me. The selection is mine. The position I take is mine. And every word that goes out under my name is still written the slow and painful way.
06 · THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
Cloë Stanbridge is the talent lead at Airtree, one of Australia’s best-known VCs, and before that she was the only tech recruiter inside SafetyCulture while it grew from 60 to 350 people in two years.
Her job is one most people never see. She helps pre-seed and seed founders make the early hires that can determine whether a company works, and connects Airtree’s portfolio companies with executive talent. Hearing from someone who has both built teams internally and advised some of Australia’s best startups, scaleups and global technology companies made this an hour well spent.
What we get into:
What the outlier founders have in common. Her answer: they know their own strengths and weaknesses, and they hire for the gaps rather than for comfort.
The first engineering hire. The real choice between someone who has scaled a company before and a junior who will live in the work, and when each one is right.
The death of the junior engineer. Her line: the junior is now a mid. AI hands juniors mid-level output, and the gap that worries her is whether they can evaluate what the tools produce.
What to do now that your best engineers can build their own company over a weekend, and why retention has become a founder-level design question rather than a perks question.
Why it matters: this issue is about teams changing shape, and Cloë sits exactly where those new shapes are formed: in the first hires made by Australia’s next generation of companies.
Listen: YouTube · Apple · Spotify · Full show notes
07 · THE ASK
In one month’s time, I’m attending Startup People Summit, a one-day online event. The speakers include two past podcast guests, Michael Batko and Claudia Barriga-Larriviere. The event is focused on building and scaling people functions, and ultimately building great teams, so the topics should be highly relevant to anyone who reads this newsletter.
The founder, Matt McFarlane, is deeply connected to the community, and I’m confident he will put on a great event. I love supporting local events, so take a look at the program and register if it’s relevant to you.
Cheers,
James
Tech Teams Tuesday is the weekly read from Building Tech Teams. Written by James MacDonald, MD of NTP Talent. The AI Jobs Index is a Building Tech Teams publication.
My head already explodes at 50 agents....