(2026-01-09) Category Pirates The Secret To Success In 2026 Is Hiding In Plain Sight: Linkedin, Lenny, Noam Just Proved It

CategoryPirates: The Secret to Success In 2026 Is Hiding in Plain Sight (LinkedIn, Lenny & Noam Just Proved It). Two completely different (profound) datasets just landed. And most people missed it.

One came from LinkedIn, tracking millions of real career moves over 2.5 years.
The other came from (the legendary) Lenny Rachitsky and Noam Segal, surveying 1,750 tech workers deep in the trenches of AI adoption.

Same conclusion: And it’s the exact thing we’ve been yelling about for years. Now the data has caught up:
The people winning with AI aren’t using it as a tool.
They’re building it as a co-founder.

LinkedIn Shows Where the Market Is Moving

Here are the fastest-rising roles:

• Founders
• AI engineers
• Independent advisors
• AI strategists & consultants

And nearly 3× since 2022.

This is not a startup craze.

It’s a career escape pattern.

A mass opt-out of the status-quo career ladder.

People aren’t just changing jobs. They’re changing how they relate to work.

Lenny Shows Why This Is Happening

Lenny and Noam ran one of the largest independent AI productivity surveys we’ve seen:

• 55% say AI exceeded expectations
• 70% say AI improved quality of work

But here’s the insight that matters most:
Founders are getting dramatically more value from AI than anyone else.

49% of founders save 6+ hours per week

That’s not because founders are smarter. It’s because when you think of yourself as a founder, you use AI differently.

(The founder mindset is fundamentally different from the employee mindset.)

The Pattern That Explains Everything

PMs mostly use AI to:

• Write PRDs
• Make decks
• Build prototypes

Founders use AI for:

• Decision making (32.9%)
• Product ideation
• Vision and strategy

Lenny Rachitsky & Noam Segal call this out directly: founders are treating AI as a thought partner and sounding board — not a feature factory

And to be crystal clear — we are not talking about Free ChatGPT

They build custom AI that is:

• Trained on their thinking
• Fed their intellectual capital
• Tuned to their decisions, POVs, and patterns

Creator capitalists are... compounding their own.

This is exactly why we’ve been building and writing about agentic leadership — long before the data caught up

Creator Capitalists: The Throughline Between Both Datasets

LinkedIn shows more people becoming:

• Founders
• Advisors
• Consultants
• Solo operators

Lenny shows who benefits most from AI:

• People who own outcomes
• People who frame problems
• People who make decisions

Put those together and the signal is unmistakable:
AI is turning people into Creator Capitalists.

Creator Capitalists:
Don’t sell hours

They use AI to:

• Turn thinking into assets
• Turn time into optionality
• Turn judgment into leverage
• Turn experience into intellectual capital

That’s why we want you to think of yourself as the founder of your career — with AI as your co-founder. Once you own your career, everything changes.)

Why You Should Build Your Own AI (Even If Your Company Won’t)

Regardless of your role.

Because the data is crystal clear:

• Generic AI = generic returns
• Custom AI = asymmetric advantage

The people getting outsized value are training AI on:

• Their notes
• Their writing
• Their decisions
• Their frameworks
• Their past work

They’re building an always-on partner that:

• Remembers everything
• Challenges assumptions
• Spots patterns
• Sharpens judgment

This Is the Real Career Divide Now

Creator Capitalists vs. Execution Labor

We Didn’t Predict This. We Saw It Early.
That’s what Category Designers do.

This is why we’ve been writing / teaching:

• AI as a co-founder
• Building custom, paid AI
• Training it on you
• Designing your career so you become a category of one

*As Kevin Weil put it:

“The AI model you’re using today is the worst one you’ll ever use.”
Which means the compounding hasn’t even started.*