“Our industry does not respect tradition,
it only respects innovation.”
Satya Nadella, CEO di Microsoft
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There is a new drug in the office. It’s called vibe coding.
A dopamine rush with each line of code generated by the AI. The code appears. Problems fade away. The speed is intoxicating. If you’ve tried it, you know what that means.
But like any addiction, it has a hidden cost.
An invisible tax on your ability to stay focused. On the important things.
The secret project
How many are at home right now asking AI to turn their vision into code? Into a product?
If you are your own boss, it is a superpower.
But what if you work for someone else?
How many are building their personal project during working hours?
“Are they stealing company time?”
The question is wrong. It is only asked by those who are frightening themselves by reading these lines….
The right question is a different one.
This energy, this passion, this creativity-where are we channeling it?
If it’s not going toward your project, toward your strategy, the fault is not with AI or any other tool.
The Exit Economy
There is a system that produces tradition.
And a system that rewards innovation.
Satya Nadella says our world only respects the latter.
Creative energy is like water. It always looks for a way out.
If you don’t give her a river to run, she will dig her own bed. Or it will break the dam.
Your company may be a dam full of cracks.
Every day, a frustrated engineer, a bored marketer, a misunderstood designer uses the tools you provide to build his or her future.
The company pays the salary, the software, the connection.
Unknowingly, he becomes the angel investor of a startup of which he will never receive a single share.
This is the Exit Economy.
An underground economy fueled not by capital but by boredom.
The financial hemorrhage
The cost of boredom is not an employee looking at memes on Tiktok or searching for cheap flights on Skyscanner.
The cost of boredom is talent designing its way out.
It is a silent hemorrhage. Hundreds of billions lost each year in productivity. A mountain of money wasted for every desk occupied by those who have lost enthusiasm. It’s not just the time lost in useless meetings or “busy work,” it’s the value that is not created.
According to Gallup, the disengagement child of boredom costs the economy nearly $500 billion a year. In productivity that fades away
Boredom is contagious. It spreads like a virus, extinguishing passion, undermining the work of others, turning a motivated team into a group of people waiting for Friday.
But the biggest cost is strategic.
It is the price of a company that stops innovating and growing.
Psychology of separation
This bleeding is not the problem. It is the symptom.
No one chooses to be unmotivated. It is bad management that pushes the best people like a centrifugal force away from the company, denying basic human needs: purpose, challenge, autonomy.
Overwhelmed by bullshit jobs (literally bullshit jobs) as in David Graeber’s book I recommend.
Reports that no one will read. Superfluous meetings. It is meaningless activity that consumes the soul.
Monotony is a cage. Even the most talented get bored when work becomes routine, when new challenges are lacking.
Work without purpose is just exhausting employment. When you don’t see how your contribution connects to a larger goal, motivation collapses. It is the highway to “quiet quitting.”
And then, for the most creative, there is the coup de grace: an ignored idea does not die. It just looks for a way out.
Stifled entrepreneurship seeks a lane escape on its own.
Put it all together and the dynamic is clear. Companies, by their mismanagement of the sense of progress, create an efficient channel for new ideas that they will not enjoy.
They invest millions to train the brightest minds. Then they suffocate them. And when they leave, they take that field training with them, paid for by you.
It is a “boredom subsidy” worth billions. A gift to venture capital that will profit from your unwitting funding.
The rival factory
Companies around the world have become the best “Founder Factories.” Involuntary Incubators.
Moreover, the pandemic has shown that with a permanent job you can be a freelancer with a secure salary.
I have collected some case studies divided by category.
Category 1: visionaries not included
It happens when a company doesn’t just ignore an idea. It rejects it. Actively. It looks one of its employees in the eye and says “no.”
And then she watches him leave. And build an empire on that rejection.
Case Study: Zoom, Eric Yuan ex-Cisco
Eric Yuan was not just any employee. He was the vice president of Cisco’s collaboration division. The head of WebEx.
But every morning he woke up with a burden. “I didn’t see a single happy customer,” he said.
Yuan did not see a product. He saw frustration. An old architecture designed for a pre-mobile world. An awkward, unreliable experience. A product that apologized for existing.
He saw the future. A cloud, mobile, simple future. A future that would “make people happy.”
In 2011, he presented this vision to Cisco. Rebuild everything from scratch.
The answer? A “no.” For management, the problem was “solved.”
It was not possible to charge people $9.99 for software that large companies were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for. How to justify it?
But Cisco didn’t just reject an idea. They lost sight of the future. When Yuan walked out the door, he was not alone. With him were 40 of his best engineers. A whole team capable of great things.
Cisco did not lose a VP. He lost the knowledge, the passion, the talent that he had spent years cultivating.
In practice, it financed the birth of its biggest competitor.
Another example?
See also the story of NeXT, Steve Jobs ex-Apple.
Category 2: Product and process perfectionists
Sometimes, the urge to quit those who pay your salary is not an epiphany.
It is an intolerance. An allergy to inefficiency. An Implacable frustration with poor quality, with “it could be better.”
It is the boredom that assails those who have reached the summit and find that the only thing they are asked to do is keep the base camp tidy.
These founders are not running away from failure but from success that has become a cage.
Case Study: Nest Labs, Tony Fadell ex-Apple
Tony Fadell was not fired. He was not ignored.
He was a hero. The “father of the iPod.” He had helped create one of the most iconic objects of our time.
But after the triumph, comes the role as manager of incremental improvements, of minor tweaks.
“I don’t like the maintenance mode,” he said. “It’s not what gets me out of bed.” You can read his story in the book Build. Unorthodox guidance for success.
Fadell was a man who saw the beginning of things. And in Apple, many things had already begun. His job was no longer to pick the first mountain to climb, but to polish the trophies.
So he began to look around. To see a world full of objects that were essential, but unloved. Objects that worked, but did not inspire.
Like the thermostat.
He left Apple not because of failure, but because he was bored with success. And he founded Nest Labs to bring design and intelligence to an object that everyone took for granted.
No one has antibodies to the boredom virus. Even the world’s most innovative companies risk losing their top talent if they do not offer them a renewed sense of progress.
Another example?
See also Expedia story, Rich Barton ex-Microsoft
Category 3: culturally disillusioned
Sometimes, it is not the product that is wrong. It is not the process that is broken.
It is culture.
A fundamental misalignment with the environment. A feeling of suffocation, of bureaucracy, of dissatisfaction.
You don’t leave because of an idea. You leave to find the air again. To get back to having fun.
Case Study: Valve, Gabe Newell ex-Microsoft
Gabe Newell had spent 13 years at Microsoft. He was a “Microsoft Millionaire.” He had helped build the first versions of Windows.
But the company had changed. It had become a “much less pleasant place to create products.”
The spark came from market research. The discovery? The most installed software on Windows PCs was not from Microsoft. It was a video game: Doom.
There, in that given, was a universe. A huge opportunity in entertainment that Microsoft’s rigid, hierarchical corporate culture was not equipped to seize.
Newell didn’t just want a new product. He wanted a new way of working. He wanted “as much fun as possible.”
So, in 1996, he left. And he founded Valve on a philosophy that was a direct rebellion to what he had left behind. The first result? A game called Half-Life, which redefined his genre forever.
I vividly remember summer nights spent with the overclocked computer. Did you play on it, too?
But the real innovation was not in the software. It was in the organizational chart. Or rather, in its absence.
Valve has become a radical experiment, a pioneer in the utopia of self-management, pioneering concepts such as Holacracy. No hierarchies. No bosses. Desks with wheels to form fluid teams.
One big dream: to give talented people the freedom to create great games.
Of course, a utopia can have its nightmares. Social pressure replaces managerial pressure, and without formal guidance, ideas can struggle to find traction.
But his was not an escape in pursuit of an idea. It was an escape to pursue a culture. A culture, even with its imperfections, where smart, motivated people could go back and have fun creating things that would excite millions.
Another example?
See also Instagram story, Kevin Systrom ex-Google
Category 4: market opportunists
Sometimes, the best ideas are not born in a garage. They are born in an executive office.
A prime location that gives you a perfect view of the market’s blind spots.
These founders do not leave because they are driven out. They leave because they see something their employer cannot see. Or doesn’t want to.
They use their company as a watchtower for new opportunities. And then they quietly build what the market demands.
Case Study: Auth0, Eugene Pace ex-Microsoft
Eugenio Pace did not simply work at Microsoft. He spent a decade building its cloud, Azure. He was in the engine room.
From there, he saw a persistent, frustrating, universal problem for developers: login identity management. Login.
A sore point that all the engineers were complaining about, but no one was solving with an elegant and scalable solution.
He had what he called an “entrepreneurial itch.” Obsession. So he left to build the solution himself.
Someone told him that he would not be the one to “crack the code.” This only fueled his obsession.
Her deep knowledge, her domain expertise, she had not learned in a book. It had been forged within Microsoft.
The company gave him the treasure map. But he was the one who decided to go digging.
Another example?
See also the story of WhatsApp, Jan Koum and Brian Acton ex-Yahoo
Category 5: innovators by accident
Sometimes, the best products are not the result of a strategy.
They are born by accident. Or rather, out of frustration.
They are internal tools, created to solve an immediate problem, to remove an obstacle that slows down real work.
Then, one day, you realize that the tool you built to do the work is the work.
The secondary project was, in fact, the main project.
Case Study: Slack, Stewart Butterfield ex-Tiny Speck
Stewart Butterfield didn’t want to change the way we work. He wanted to build a video game. It was called glitch.
But as his team built that fantasy world, he encountered a much less fantastic reality: communicating with the team was a nightmare. Email was too slow. Other options, inadequate.
It was like working with a handbrake always pulled.
So, to solve their problem, they built their own tool. An internal chat to make work on the game more efficient.
In the end, the game failed. It did not find its audience. As they were preparing to shut everything down, they realized something.
The tool they had built to create the failed game was far more innovative and valuable than the game itself.
They made a pivot. They abandoned the game and launched their own in-house tool on the market.
They called him Slack.
The origin of Slack is the ultimate proof of how innovation can emerge directly from the friction of everyday work. Not as a goal, but as an unintended side effect of another purpose.
The next innovation could come from a bored employee
Companies like yours attract the best, train them, immerse them in an ecosystem dense with insights. Then, their own structure, hierarchy, bureaucracy, risk aversion, pushes them out.
It is not a hypothesis. It is a fact. In Europe and Israel, former employees of 203 unicorns have founded more than 1,000 new startups.3 More than 2,300 ex-Google-born companies have raised $98 billion.4 Nearly 600 companies born from ex-Apple are worth more than $180 billion.5
An entire economy built on talent that has not found a place.
Engineering progress in the enterprise with MAKE PROGRESS®
The next billion-dollar idea is there, inside a Google Drive file shared with a personal email. Hidden in a project you underestimated. Fueled by the frustration created by a boring strategy.
The instinctive reaction might be control. Force everyone to use timesheets to understand “what people do all day…”
A boring strategy is a luxury you cannot afford
I wrote some time ago that a strategy that no one cares about is just a useless document. No one gets passionate about a PowerPoint. No one devotes his or her life to a goal written in “corporatism.”
A boring strategy does not create alignment, it creates obedience.
It does not generate commitment, it generates conformity.
It does not create progress, it only creates task list completion.
The alternative is no longer control. It is an operating system designed to create focus and flow.
A system engineered so that progress is inevitable.
The choice is this: either create a strategy so clear, compelling and magnetic that it becomes the most interesting problem to solve. A strategy that offers autonomy, that makes everyone’s impact visible, that turns work into a compelling game.
Or, prepare to compete with the company you are financing without knowing it.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
Antonio
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PS: A boring strategy is only your choice. But…if you are ready to make a different choice, I have opened some spaces in my calendar to draw the map together. Find yours here.
- Losing staff due to dull, repetitive work? You are not alone. – We Are Amnet, accessed July 23, 2025, https://www.weareamnet.com/blog/losing-staff-due-to-dull-repetitive-work-you-are-not-alone/ ↩︎
- THE BOREDOM – Baker Stuart, accessed July 23, 2025, https://bakerstuart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/The-Boredom-Boom-FINAL.pdf ↩︎
- Unicorn alumni founder factories | Dealroom.co, accessed July 23, 2025, https://dealroom.co/blog/founder-factories-fuelling-next-gen-startups ↩︎
- From Google to game changers: 9 startups founded by ex-Googlers that secured big funding in AI, accessed July 23, 2025, https://techfundingnews.com/ex-googlers-take-the-lead-startups-that-raised-funding-to-power-ai-boom/ ↩︎
- Ex-Apple staff are behind hundreds of top tech startups – AppleInsider, accessed July 23, 2025, https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/15/ex-apple-staff-are-behind-hundreds-of-top-tech-startups ↩︎
