about centaurprise

Welcome! I’m writing for founders, operators, and other folks who are navigating the shift from traditional orgs to ones filled with copilots, agents, disappearing roles, and a wave of emerging new ones. The tech is rolling out fast, and I don’t think many people are tracking where it’s rolling to.

You’ll notice quickly that I’m not a “true believer” or an AI hype-man. I don’t write about hand-wavy futurism, agents-on-Mars, or UBI-and-piña-coladas. centaurprise is meant to be practical, observations from building a startup, frameworks for understanding misconceptions in the wild, conversations worth having as we build, sell, and grow.

I’m not interested in the two extremes predicted by most pundits, where AI either 1) just helps us do what we already do but faster, or 2) replaces all human labor by default, no exceptions. Those are failures of imagination.

The more interesting, useful outcomes are the ones where humans use AI to fundamentally shift what we do and why.

AI could lead to a future of extreme micro-entrepreneurship, or major centralization in industry.

It could widen the gap between the developed world and the developing, or snap it shut in months.

AI could make software suites more powerful than they’ve ever been, or render most software companies of the past two decades totally obsolete.

Making sense of what’s possible and what’s worth building will determine the winners and losers in this space.

So what can you expect here? Sometimes it’s frameworks. Sometimes it’s strange observations. Sometimes it’s war stories and hard-won lessons from the trenches. Sometimes it’s experiments and data (when I can share them). But always: human, useful, and forward-facing.

why “centaurprise”?

The centaur — half human, half machine — is a common metaphor for hybrid human-AI intelligence. The “centaur” model allocates tasks based on opportunity cost and optimal performance. It’s about collaboration: automation and intuition, making the most of what humans and agents each bring to the table.

This newsletter explores what it means when not just individuals, but entire organizations become centaurs. The long-term benefits and costs of LLM use (e.g. “vibe-coding”) are still coming into view; what’s not clear yet is how companies will change once that use saturates.

In the near future, organizations will need to be designed around a whole new set of building blocks. Individual productivity is changing rapidly. Engineering has a whole new cost curve. Product management is already unrecognizable at cutting-edge companies. Other functions aren’t far behind.

We’re not just adding a new tool. We’re entering a new design space.

It’s going to be fun.

who’s behind this?

I’m DJ — a founder and product builder based in San Francisco, with 14+ years in AI/ML and 7+ years in GTM leadership across startups and scaleups. I’ve worked with teams at places like Scale AI, Slack, McKinsey, and the US Air Force.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of gigue — an AI-native multiplayer IDE for revenue teams. It’s a new kind of tool for a new kind of sales rep, one that treats sales artifacts as executable code and focuses the entire context of the org on each and every message and document that goes out. But that’s just the beginning.

I believe that helping people communicate with less drudgery and busywork is the key to unlocking AI-native capability, in every team, at every level. We’re building a platform where agents can perform at their best by accessing high-quality context, delivered securely, reliably, and collaboratively, and use it to empower people proactively so they always feel supported and anticipated by their tech stack.

Humans should be incredible at work. Work should be incredible for humans.

centaurprise is where I share the philosophy behind that work, and where I invite others to help shape the future with us. AI is chaotic, but there’s a window for leaders to choose whether the tech settles at a local maxima or achieves its full potential. We’ve got a big vision for how much better we can make AI for its users, buyers, and stakeholders. I hope you’ll see the same vision we do.

get involved

🧪 Try gigue — We’re already helping teams reclaim over 29 hours a week with proactive AI that prompts itself and operates in a secure, scalable, multiplayer environment. Our mission is to make humans incredible at work, and work incredible for humans. Sign up to try it out here.

📬 Subscribe — Get new posts in your inbox on human-AI company-building, org design, experiments, and lessons learned. I’ll be trying out a bunch of things in the coming weeks: releasing code, datasets, spinning up events, Notes, potentially even podcasts or videos as we ramp up.

Thanks for reading.