I Don’t Want to Be a CEO Again
A public experiment in building a company where humans stop being the default operating layer.
For the last 16 years, I have been building a SaaS company.
A real one.
With customers, product development, implementation, support, sales, finance, lawyers, partners, investors, roadmaps, hiring, leaders, meetings, priorities, conflicts, communication, structure and all the invisible work that appears when a company starts to grow.
I am grateful for that journey.
But I also know one thing very clearly:
I don’t want to be a CEO again.
Not in the classical sense.
Not as the person who keeps building a larger human organization around every operational problem.
Not as someone who responds to every increase in complexity with another role, another team, another leader and another layer of coordination.
For years, this was the natural way to build a company.
A problem appears. You hire a person.
The problem grows. You create a role.
The role gets overloaded. You build a team.
The team grows. You need a leader.
The structure grows. You need meetings, reporting, processes and synchronization.
This is the classic path of a company.
And very often, it works.
But it also gets heavy.
Over time, the founder spends less energy designing the system and more energy servicing the organization.
Less creating.
More coordinating.
Less asking what should exist.
More maintaining what already exists.
I am not saying this is wrong.
I am saying I don’t want to build a company this way again.
Not because people are the problem.
But because, over the years, I have seen how much human energy companies spend on work that was never truly human work.
People often become the glue between systems.
They move information.
They coordinate.
They wait for decisions.
They handle exceptions.
They translate between systems.
They copy data.
They send status updates.
They follow up and remind.
They manually connect processes that should have been designed differently in the first place.
For a long time, this was normal because we did not have a better alternative.
Software helped, but it still often needed a human as the interface.
The human was the default operating layer of the company.
If something had to happen, someone had to do it.
If something had to be checked or connected, someone had to do it.
If a process had an exception, someone had to resolve it.
AI changes the question.
Not completely.
Not magically.
Not without risk.
But enough to ask a different question than before.
Not only:
How can AI help people work faster?
But rather:
What would a company look like if it were designed from the beginning around AI, automation and systems, instead of humans as the default execution layer?
This is the question Zero Human Company starts with.
I don’t know if a true “zero human” company is possible.
Maybe the honest answer will be a low-human company, not a zero-human company.
Some functions will probably move almost entirely into systems, while others will always require human judgment, trust, taste, responsibility or boundary decisions.
That is exactly what I want to test.
Publicly.
Not as a finished method.
Not as a promise.
Not as another newsletter about AI.
I want to document the process of finding the answer before it becomes polished and named after the fact.
What works.
What breaks.
Where AI creates real leverage.
Where it only looks like it has agency.
Where a workflow is enough, and where a human still needs to be involved.
And where a human should never have been used as the operational solution in the first place.
I don’t want to be a CEO again.
I want to find out what replaces that role when a company is designed around AI-powered systems, not around human operational work.
And I want to document that path in its raw form, before it becomes complete, structured and polished.