Why I am Writing About AI (and Why It’s Not Just About My Company)
My marketing team has been asking me to write more about Markup AI — what we do, why it matters, where we’re headed. And I will. I’m the CEO of a company that builds Content Guardian Agents to help enterprises scale AI-generated content smartly and safely. I love what we’re building. I believe in it deeply. And I’ll reference it when it’s relevant. I also love how we’re building things, since we are hardcore practitioners using AI to build our business at decent scale.
But if you’ve read this blog over the years — through my two decades at Return Path, my time building Bolster, and three books on startup leadership — you know that’s never been what this space is about. This blog has always been about the craft of being a CEO. The stuff that should be in a handbook somewhere but isn’t.
So no, I’m not going to turn StartupCEO.com into a company blog. What I am going to do is write a series of posts about how CEOs should be thinking about AI — because I don’t think enough of us are, and I don’t think anyone else is writing about it from the operator’s chair.
What I’ll Cover
I plan to write about the practical side of AI for leaders: how I’m using AI tools to run my company and my executive team. How AI changes board dynamics and governance. What I’m reading and what’s worth your time (consider me your AI curator-in-chief). How AI is reshaping go-to-market, product development, hiring, and decision-making. And yes, where Markup AI fits into the picture — because our work on content governance is one of the most interesting AI problems out there, and I’d be leaving out a big part of the story if I didn’t talk about it.
But this isn’t a product blog. It’s a leadership blog. That’s on brand for me.
Why This Matters: Three Kinds of CEOs
Here’s what I’ve observed over the past year. There are three kinds of CEOs right now:
- CEOs who are actively using AI — experimenting, building workflows, changing how their teams operate, pushing the boundaries.
- CEOs who are telling their people to use AI — they get it conceptually, they’ve mandated adoption, but they’re not in the weeds themselves.
- CEOs who don’t get it — they think this is someone else’s problem, or that it will sort itself out, or that it’s overhyped.
If you’re in category one, I want to compare notes with you. If you’re in category two, I want to pull you forward. If you’re in category three…I probably can’t help you.
Why Now
I was at a Gartner CEO conference on AI not long ago, and one line keeps rattling around in my brain: “There is such a rapid pace of development that we are regularly seeing ‘obsolescence before maturity.'” In other words, by the time AI products reach early adoption, they’re already being replaced by something better.
That’s the pace we’re dealing with. And it feels familiar. I started my first company in 1999, right at the dawn of the commercial internet. This moment feels like 1995 — except everything is moving faster, the stakes are higher, and the potential impact is broader. We are living through a golden age of technology transformation, and the CEOs who lean into it are going to build the defining companies of the next decade.
I don’t say that lightly. I’ve seen hype cycles come and go. This isn’t one of them.
More to Come
So that’s what’s ahead: a series of posts, coming regularly, about AI through the lens of a CEO who’s building an AI company, running a team with AI tools, sitting on boards that are grappling with AI governance, and trying to make sense of it all in real time.
I hope you’ll come along for the ride.