There are companies today paying domain experts handsome hourly rates to help train the very models designed to make that expertise abundant. Cash today, in exchange for the asset that was supposed to be their ladder into the American Dream.
A few weeks ago my co-founder Harpreet gave you a test to run on anyone you’re about to hire: what happens to your fee if this doesn’t work? Watch the face. That test exposes the buyer’s half of a bad bargain: paying for activity while the risk stays with you.
But there’s a second half, running quietly on the other side of every one of those invoices, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night. It’s the bad bargain running on the people doing the work. Harpreet wrote about the buyer’s side of the table. This is about the other side.
The bargain that built the knowledge economy
For as long as work has existed, it ran on an unwritten bargain. You traded your labor for cash today and for something more valuable: experience that compounded. Every problem you solved made you worth more tomorrow. Your experience became your equity. You carried it in your own head, the market repriced it at every annual review and every job change, and if things went right it carried you across a line: from selling your time to owning things that paid you back. A career was a ladder from labor into ownership. That ladder is the mechanism for the American Dream.
Look closely and the ladder was always held together by the same problem hiding behind those invoices: the principal-agent problem, stacked three layers deep. Investors want maximum return on minimum time per company. That’s not a character flaw, it’s the arithmetic of running a portfolio. Leaders, squeezed for efficient growth, are structurally pushed to spend less on labor. That’s not villainy either, it’s the mandate. And the worker at the bottom of the stack accepted it all, because the bargain held: cash now, compounding experience, wealth eventually. Everyone played the same game, and the game mostly worked, as long as experience kept compounding.
AI is breaking the bargain
Now watch what AI does to that ladder. It doesn’t just make activity cheap. It starts converting human experience itself into something that can be extracted, bottled, and scaled without the human. That’s what those hourly training contracts are. It is the worker’s bargain running in reverse: your experience compounds, but into someone else’s balance sheet.
Cash today, in exchange for the ladder itself. And the dream at the top of it.
People can feel it, even the ones who can’t yet name it. 55% of Americans now say AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives (Quinnipiac, March 2026). Only about a third still say the American Dream holds true (AP-NORC, April 2026). Bloomberg Businessweek put a name on it with a cover story this summer, “The Golden Age of Grift,” and the phrase lands because the pattern is everywhere: systems that harvest your contribution while the upside migrates somewhere else. Labor arbitrage has always existed; ask any town that watched its factory leave. What’s new is the scale. When the arbitrage reaches almost everyone, the ladder isn’t fraying at the edges. It’s being pulled up.
An American answer, seventy years old
We have been somewhere near here before, and at least one American thinker already showed the way out. Louis Kelso watched mid-century finance concentrate the returns to capital and asked a simple question: if the machines and the money make the wealth, how does the worker ever get any? His answer wasn’t to slow the machines. It was ownership: put a piece of the upside in the hands of the people who created it. The employee stock ownership plan he invented now covers millions of American workers, championed across seventy years by both parties, because the idea underneath it isn’t left or right. It’s the American Dream, written into a cap table. It’s an idea that travels.
Kelso solved it for employees of companies. Nobody has solved it for the people whose experience is bigger than one company: the CEO, COO, functional leaders and domain experts who have done it before. Those whose judgment is the most valuable thing in any room they walk into, and who can only ever own a piece of it one cap table at a time. The market’s answer to them is the reversed bargain: world-class experience, rented by the hour, compounding into nothing.
What we built instead
123G’s answer is the same mechanism on both sides of one contract, and it is not an aspiration. The client side is in a two-page contract. The Operator side is in our operating agreement.
The client stops paying for hours, and a meaningful piece of what they pay rides on the outcome. That’s the promise in Harpreet’s post. And the people who deliver those outcomes, we call them Strategic Operators, own a piece of them. Not a day rate that decays. A share in the thing their judgment and hands actually created. Kelso gave employees equity in companies. We built the network where Operators hold a stake in outcomes. An ESOP for Operators.
Understand what that alignment buys you if you’re the client, because it’s the quality engine. A Strategic Operator with a share in your outcome behaves like an owner in your building: they tell you what not to buy. They stay until it works. They bring their best people with them because the network’s compounding is their compounding. I couldn’t tell you how many hours our Operators put in. I can tell you exactly what each one is working on and what came of it because that’s the only thing I track. The best experience in America will concentrate wherever it’s owned rather than rented. We built that place. It’s already working. Almost all of our Strategic Operators have worked with Harpreet or me before, and everyone who started 123G with us is still here. That’s what “whoever you get, you get all of us” actually means.
And if you’re an Operator: you spent a career building outcomes that made great companies, carrying the plan, the payroll, and the risk for a salary and a handshake. You are exactly who this network was built for. Your experience should compound for you. The market’s offer to you now is an hourly rate to bottle what you know. Ours is choosing problems worth your experience, working them beside people who’ve carried what you’ve carried, and owning a piece of what you deliver. That’s the path John Farrell took: founding head of our fintech vertical, now CEO of Vaiu Global. Incumbents have a cushion. Insurgents have the right to aspire and nothing to fall back on but their own people. That is a way of acting, not a size. The companies we work for choose it. So do our Operators.
Keep the dream alive
I don’t know how the great AI transition goes for everyone, and I distrust anyone who claims to. But I know which side of the ledger we’ve chosen. The bad bargain, on both sides of the table, runs on the same fuel: people paying for things that don’t pay them back. Activity that isn’t an outcome. Labor that doesn’t compound. We can’t legislate that away from inside one company. We can build the working alternative and let it grow.
So this is where 123G began. We tie our pay to outcomes. Our Strategic Operators own a piece of those outcomes. We work to keep the dream alive.
If you’re a leader at an inflection point: run the test on us, then bring us your hardest problem, and we’ll put our own compensation on turning it into our proof point. And if you’ve done it before and want a stake in doing it again: contact us.
