Independent Collaborators
Self-Supervised Work
The future of work is self-supervised.
I hear this in the echoing voice of Yann LeCun while reflecting on the qualities I respect most in people I work with.
Writing careers descriptions forced a deeper question: If the future of work is self-supervised, how do we match complementary people to a shared objective?
The answer begins with the independent collaborator: someone who forms judgments independently while making their learning available to others.
The initials are familiar. In most organizations, IC means individual contributor: someone whose primary responsibility is doing the work rather than managing others. But the conventional term says little about how that person thinks, acts, or participates as part of a team.
An independent collaborator adds two explicit expectations.
Independent means capable of making decisions, identifying useful work, and taking responsibility without waiting for every step to be prescribed.
Collaborator means making that judgment legible to others: sharing context, inviting disagreement, coordinating around dependencies, and returning results and feedback so the wider group can update.
The pairing matters. Independence without collaborating leads to work in isolation. Collaboration without independence leads to dependence on consensus and validation-seeking.
The goal is to preserve our individuality and creativity while making our work useful and learnable across the wider team.
The Company as a Launchpad
My responsibility is to create conditions in which we can do meaningful work and grow into opportunities larger than the roles we initially joined.
I am focusing on the earliest stage of team formation because that is where we are today. These principles will endure as the company grows; we will adapt the structure as the team evolves.
The work itself has no fixed destination. As model capabilities expand, new technical possibilities, product surfaces, and forms of interaction will emerge that we cannot fully anticipate today.
Building around independent collaborators means giving meaningful authority over decisions and responsibility for their consequences. Early team members will grow more capable of articulating their vision, exercising judgment, leading others, and building systems of their own.
Some will eventually create new teams, products, or organizations within or beyond the company. This will not be understood as a failure in retention, but as evidence that the environment we create is expanding agency and capabilities.
The strongest companies become launchpads for future founders, leaders, and collaborators. That is the kind of organization I hope to build.
From Labels to Feedback
The connection between self-supervised learning and organizational design begins with reducing our reliance on labels.
In self-supervised learning, the system derives a learning signal from relationships embedded within the data itself. It still has an objective and constraints, but it does not require a person to label every example.
Explicit instructions can provide useful stability, like cognitive training wheels, especially when we are new to a problem. But when every action is prescribed, we have little opportunity to develop the judgment required to move independently.
Independent collaborators are both students and teachers within the organization. They learn openly from the judgment, experience, and evidence around them while making their own reasoning and discoveries available to others.
To be a better teacher, become a student.
To be a better student, become a teacher.
These are qualities I look for in the initial team: continual learning paired with visible demonstration. The goal is not simply to accumulate individual expertise, but to create an environment in which each person's learning expands the capabilities of the group.
Given a shared mission, access to context, and responsibility for outcomes, we learn from customer behavior, product usage, technical constraints, disagreement, and the consequences of shipped work rather than waiting for each action to be assigned.
Give capable people the authority to test their judgment against reality, and they may discover directions that no planning process could have prescribed in advance.
Building Around Independent Collaborators
Recognizing Independent Collaborators
Independent collaborators are easiest to recognize by how they respond when the problems are open-ended.
They tend to:
- ask questions that improve the definition of the problem;
- form a point of view without pretending certainty;
- notice useful work beyond the literal assignment;
- take responsibility for outcomes, not only deliverables;
- update quickly when evidence contradicts them.
The defining quality is not certainty. It is the ability to generate useful direction under uncertainty and to remain open to correction.
Supporting Independent Collaborators
Autonomy is not the absence of structure. It depends on leading with:
- a clear mission;
- explicit boundaries and decision rights;
- direct access to customers, data, and technical reality;
- clear evaluations anchored to outcomes;
- fast feedback on consequential decisions;
- protection from unnecessary approval chains;
- permission to challenge the framing of an assignment.
The organization should be precise about objectives and constraints while remaining flexible about the path.
Connecting Independent Collaborators
A strong organization combines two qualities that can initially appear opposed: local autonomy and global coherence.
Independent collaborators need the freedom to investigate, decide, and act without constant centralized coordination. But independent action only strengthens the organization when assumptions, evidence, decisions, and consequential learning can move efficiently across the group.
High-Bandwidth Interconnect
A cluster is not created simply by placing more processors beside one another. Each processor must be capable of useful local computation, but the system's performance also depends on how efficiently information moves between them. Without an effective interconnect, capable processors lose sight of a cohesive objective.
Independent collaborators are the CPUs of the system: they hold sequential judgment, steer the workloads, and absorb consequences. Agents are the GPUs: high-throughput parallel action following that aim. As agent capability rises, the scarce resource is not just more generation; it is the individuals who can direct, evaluate, and synchronize long-form work toward a shared objective.
The best independent collaborators are high-bandwidth participants in a shared system. They can work deeply without continuous coordination, then communicate the information others need to update their own understanding. They know what can remain local and what must be synchronized.
A strong culture functions like an interconnect fabric. It reduces the cost of sharing context without requiring every decision to pass through a central controller.
This architecture depends on three elements:
Local intelligence. People can investigate, decide, and act without waiting for continuous centralized direction.
High-bandwidth interconnect. Assumptions, evidence, decisions, and consequential learning move efficiently across the group.
Global coherence. The organization retains a clear identity, mission, and scope against which local decisions can be evaluated.
What the Interconnect Looks Like
In a startup, the interconnect is the operating interface through which independent work stays coordinated: shared written context, visible priorities, clear ownership, accessible work in progress, and short decision-oriented conversations. The rhythm is long periods of focused execution, interrupted by brief, prepared moments of synchronization.
Keep execution local when possible, but share consequential learning across the organization.
My Commitment
This is not a description of a culture I have already implemented or perfected. It is a commitment to the kind of company I want to build and the responsibility I am accepting as the team begins to grow.
I want to work with people who form their own judgment, make that judgment legible to others, and direct their energy toward strengthening both the product and the people around them.
My role is to provide a clear mission, direct access to reality, explicit priorities, and clear boundaries for decision-making. It is also to build strong connections across the team and create enough breathing room to discover what none of us could have specified in advance.
The goal is to protect independent judgment while creating the conditions to strengthen a cohesive team.