The corporate ladder is no longer attractive for knowledge workers, for a range of reasons. At Lovable, an AI-powered app development startup, growth leader Elena Verna recently shed her management title to return to individual contributor work, and in doing so shipped an enterprise pricing page that previously would have required a product manager, designer, and engineering team working across at least a week of calendar time. She did it alone, in hours. This is a part of a wider trend showing what organizational design should look like when AI erases the coordination costs that made management necessary in the first place.

Verna calls this new archetype the High-Impact Individual Contributor, or HI-C: a senior professional with no direct reports who can carry a project from initial hypothesis to measurable business outcome, end-to-end, independently. A traditional IC owns a slice of the workflow but a HI-C owns the whole thing.

The Investor Thesis Underneath

Venture capital has been circling this structural shift for two years. In March 2026, Sequoia Capital partner Julien Bek published "Services: The New Software," arguing that for every dollar spent on software, six go to services, and that the next trillion-dollar company will sell outcomes rather than tools. The implicit corollary: the most efficient delivery mechanism for those outcomes is a small team of high-leverage individuals paired with AI, not layers of coordination overhead.

The numbers support the bet. In 2025, AI startups captured 61% of all global venture capital, amounting to $258.7 billion according to an OECD analysis of Preqin data. Among early-stage deals,........

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