Michael Dempsey hit a chord—a topic that’s been lighting up my private conversations lately: Post-Founder Archetypes

The moment feels similar to 2008, when finance careers went from highly coveted to passé. The social hierarchy seems to run on these ~20-year cycles.

The question now: what comes next?

I'll go a step further than Dempsey. I'm predicting the rise of the bricoleur, in the Lévi-Strauss sense of the term: someone who can make and remake things with the tools at hand. There's never been a better time to be a maker of things and stories, including your own personal myths.

If you're unbound by the dogma of product/market fit, the world opens widely, ready to be remade by a small group of friends.

I've also noticed the most interesting people I know are having a terrible time answering the "what do you do?" question. They can tell you about a project they're working on, but they'll shirk any qualifying identity description, including and especially "founder".

My favorite analogy comes from biology: monopodial vs sympodial growth in trees. Monopodials (like redwoods) have one big trunk and aim for continuous vertical growth. Sympodials (like oaks) grow via multiple branches. The metabolic strategies are very different. Monopodials put all their energy into growing tall quickly, whereas the sympodial plants hedge with multiple different leading edges, which is more resilient.

The next high-status career will be sympodial. Or what Brie Wolfson called Flounder Mode—moving from project to project with people you like, and not letting your identity get too tangled up with any one of them.