Gian Segato is a founding engineer of Replit—one of the leading AI powered agents that makes coding so simple that kids as young as four have used it to whip up live websites and apps.

Segato recently issued a profound prediction for our new AI-powered world:

“The critical dividing line in our economy is no longer simply education or specialization, but rather agency itself: the raw determination to make things happen without waiting for permission.”

Making things happen without waiting for permission is certainly an asset that’s growing in value. But today’s protagonists learned the hard way that this is merely the price of admission.

To make their ideas happen, they need something much stronger…

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and 40 principles relied on by the world’s greatest creatives. 

Most People Just Go Away

In the Spring of 1982, Howard Schultz flew to San Francisco for a dinner meeting with the founders of Starbucks, hoping to finally secure a job offer at the fledgling coffee company. Schultz had spent the past year flying back and forth between coasts to nurture the relationship, arriving each time with “a long list of ideas” for how Starbucks could be improved. 

“The dinner went exceptionally well,” Schultz recalls. "I nodded and congratulated myself as I walked back to the hotel.” “I was convinced that after all my lobbying I had the job all but sown up. I figured I would fly back to New York with an offer in hand.”

The next day, the call came. “I’m sorry Howard, I have bad news.” Schultz remembers the voice over the phone saying. It was Jerry, one of the founders. "I couldn’t believe the somber tone of his voice or the words. The three of them had talked it over and decided not to hire me. ‘But… why?’ ‘It’s too risky, too much change.’” “Your plans sound great but that’s just not the vision we have for Starbucks.” 

The distant click of the receiver dropping told Schultz the call was over—and so was his dream: "I saw my whole future flash in front of me and then crash and burn."

“Most people,” Schultz acknowledges, “when turned down for a job—just go away.” But “this was, I thought, a turning point in my life. It had to happen. I had to join Starbucks.” 

So instead of going away, Schultz called Jerry back the next day. “‘Jerry, you’re making a terrible mistake,’ I said, ‘after all this time we owe it to ourselves to isolate the issues, what exactly is the reason?’ Very calmly, we talked it over. The concern was this: the partners did not want to give me license to change the company. They worried that by hiring me, they would be committing themselves to a new direction for Starbucks.”

“Jerry,” Schultz urged, “‘this isn’t about me, it’s about you. The destiny of Starbucks is at stake. We’ve talked so much about what Starbucks can be. It’s your company, it’s your vision, you’re the only one who can achieve it, somebody has to be courageous here and it’s you! Don’t let them talk you out of something that you believe in your heart.’”

When the phone rang again the next morning, Schultz “picked up the phone on the first ring.”

“I’m sorry about the twenty four hour impasse,” Jerry said. “We’re going forward, you have the job, Howard, and you have my commitment. When can you come?”

Five years after this moment, Schultz would end up buying the company outright, and begin the journey of growing Starbucks from the six stores it had at the time to the forty thousand that exist today.

Schultz later reflected on the significance of not taking no for an answer: "In the fifteen years since then, I have often wondered what would have happened had I just accepted his decision?" "So many times I’ve been told ‘it can’t be done.’ Again and again, I’ve had to use every ounce of perseverance and persuasion I can summon to make things happen. Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see, and pursuing that vision, no matter who tells you not to. In daily life, you get so much pressure from friends and family and colleagues, urging you to take the easy way, to follow the prevailing wisdom, that it can be difficult not to simply accept the status quo and do what’s expected of you. But when you really believe—in yourself, in your dream—you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality.”

If agency is acting without first seeking permission then perhaps we could say that “supreme agency” is continuing to act even after permission is sought but repeatedly and expressly denied.

Permissionless action is what gets the ball rolling but what will you do when the world inevitably starts doing everything it can to kick it off the field?

• When the Starbucks founders later rejected Schultz’s idea to serve espresso, he left to start his own coffee company.

• When 217 investors turned down Schultz’s idea for said new coffee company, he kept pitching until he raised his funding target.

• When Schultz later tried to acquire Starbucks and one of his investors tried to beat him to the punch, he landed a meeting with Bill Gates Sr and convinced him to put up the money to win the bid.

Get started without permission, by all means, but at some point your permission will be actively denied. To make your ideas happen, you must act with supreme agency, figuring out how to press ahead even after you hit one roadblock after the next.

Even if you think you can get away without seeking permission from anyone else, the world is still full of structural blockades that will try to deny your passage, in which case you must…

Build Your Own Damn Road

In 2010, Mike Posner was a student at Duke University with a goal shared by millions and achieved by few: to launch a music career from his dorm room, bypassing the traditional industry gatekeepers.

The internet was one promising means of leapfrogging his career. Posner says he was already getting “a little bit of traction on these hip hop blogs which were important in hip hop at the time.”

But the downside with these blogs was the difficulty of the download process; “it was really convoluted and hidden behind advertisements,” and Posner realized his potential mainstream listeners—“were never going to do that. They were never gonna go to these hip hop blogs. And if—snowball chance in hell they would, they wouldn't ever be able to download the song.”

By contrast, the most user-friendly platform at the time was iTunes. But iTunes presented its own obstacle: listeners had to pay an amount greater than $0. This was a non-starter for Posner because, as he puts it “I knew no one was going to pay for my music because we weren't paying for Kanye's music. We weren't paying for Jay-Z. The artists we loved the most—we were stealing their music. So no one's going to pay for my music because no one knows who I am.”

Thus the dilemma: how to achieve both the frictionless distribution of iTunes and the zero cost availability of the blogs?

“And then I saw iTunes U,” Posner remembers, a section designed for free university course content. “So I said, I gotta get my music there.” He identified the Duke administrator in charge, “a man named Todd Stabley” and fired off a cold email.

“We could put it on iTunes U. No problem,” Stabley obliged. 

This loophole helped Posner’s music break through the noise. 

“Pretty much every college in the US was listening to Mike Posner that year,” Posner recalls. Then he watched in awe as one of the songs (that he recorded in his dorm room while his friends were out partying) began to be played all across the world—eventually being certified 6x platinum.

That song was Cooler than me.

“So this iTunes U thing,” Posner concludes, “yeah, that was pivotal for me. Pivotal.”

In Posner’s case, he was granted permission when he sought it from Stabley, but only after he overcame the implicit denial of permission from the way the digital music industry was set up in the first place. The very rules of the internet at the time denied the easy and free distribution of music but Posner found a way to subvert that permission structure.

When the road signs tell you that it isn't possible to reach your destination, build your own damn road!

The concept of permissionless action has one last plot hole…

Sign Your Own Slip

In 1978, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw was flying home to India after spending several years studying how to brew alcohol in Australia. 

Mazumdar-Shaw remembers feeling hopeful and optimistic about her future: “I came back thinking, ‘I’m going to pursue a career in brewing.’” “Having qualified as India’s first female brew master and having done that with flying colors, I thought, you know, it was going to be an easy ride for me.”

…famous last words.

“But I was in for a rude shock,” Mazumdar-Shaw continues, “because people in my own country didn’t want to hire a woman in the brewing industry.” “So I think I was extremely despondent. I was very dejected.”

Then came an unexpected intervention. An Irish entrepreneur living in India had heard about Mazumdar-Shaw’s time in Australia, tracked her down, and said “Hey, look, I’m trying to set up a biotech company in India and I’ve heard about you, and how would you like to partner with me?”

But Mazumdar-Shaw had already internalized the rejection. “my immediate response was, ‘I don’t think I’m the right partner, because I’ve just been told that this country is not a place for women in business or women trying to pursue any kind of career. I don’t have money. I don’t have business experience. And so why would you want me to partner with you in such an important endeavor?’ So I actually tried to introduce him to a very successful businessman in India, because I thought that was the more appropriate thing to do.”

“Look,” the Irish entrepreneur shot back, “if you had the spunk to do a brewing program in Australia, why can’t you have the spunk to start a company in India?” “Okay,” Mazumdar-Shaw eventually agreed, “‘I’ve got nothing to lose. Maybe I should take a stab at it.’ And so that’s how I started Biocon in 1978.”

Today, Biocon is the largest biopharma company in India with a market cap of $400bn+ and over 16,000 employees, with Mazumdar-Shaw’s personal net worth estimated at $3.1bn.

In a way, permissionless action is a misnomer.

You do in fact always need permission to get started.

But the good news is that you only need permission from a single person:

Yourself! 

Ultimately, your vote is the only one that matters when it comes to initiating action on your ideas.

The bad news is that the world will tell you how to cast your vote before you even try.

As Mazumdar-Shaw learned, almost everyone will tell you to vote “no”.

Don’t let that influence your vote.

It’s probably best to ignore all of the naysayers, at least at first. The danger of outsourcing permission to other people prior to acting on an idea is that other people, even the experts, tend to be terrible judges of an idea’s validity prior to its execution.

Do you know how many brilliant ideas were regarded as stupid or childish by smart people when they first started out? It’s most of them!

It’s only by stubbornly granting ourselves the permission to act upon our ideas that we can gather the necessary data, feedback, and understanding to know whether we should keep going.

So to play semantics with Segato’s proclamation, perhaps you do need permission to act after all. The trick is remembering that you should be the one to sign your own slip.

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