Every business leader wants to know what the future looks like. On Business Breakthroughs with Vincent Hovorka, Ryan Vet borrows a better question from Jeff Bezos: ask what is not going to change, and build there first.
For Ryan, that answer is disarmingly old-fashioned. AI is moving faster and reaching wider than any innovation before it, and yes, it will displace jobs. But a business still cannot exist without customers, and most cannot exist without a team. So before you chase the newest tool, get the two oldest things right: lead your people well and serve your clients well. Do that, and the changes take care of themselves.
Ryan's Big Takeaways
- 1
Stop asking what AI will change. Ask what won't, and build there first.
Ryan is careful not to oversell his own expertise on AI (he was writing algorithms on whiteboards from 2009 to 2019 and still calls himself no expert), and he is just as careful not to undersell the disruption: AI has touched more areas, accelerated faster, and been adopted more quickly than anything in modern history. But every innovation follows the same acceleration pattern, from the automobile to the assembly line to the internet, and each one displaced work while creating whole economies no one could yet imagine. His anchor is the question Jeff Bezos posed from an AWS stage: not "what will the future look like," but "what is not going to change." For a business, the answer never changes. You cannot exist without customers, and you usually cannot exist without a team. So lead your people well and serve your clients well before you spend a minute optimizing for AI. Do that, Ryan says, and they will adjust to whatever comes.
- 2
Let AI take the repetitive work, then reinvest the savings in the human experience.
Ryan is blunt that some roles are already on the chopping block: mass layoffs have hit development and design, and video editing is next as tools edit multicam footage in a fraction of the time. His question is not whether to automate the menial, repetitive tasks, but what you do with what you free up. If one person can now manage AI and multiply their capacity ten, twenty, or thirty times, the cash you save should not just fall to the bottom line. It should fund the thing customers increasingly want, which is real human contact. His evidence is a counter-trend: Gen Z is going back to the mall, Barnes & Noble is opening 60 new locations, and Starbucks is investing in larger stores designed to feel like a living room. The businesses that pour their AI savings into a better in-person experience are the ones that win.
- 3
Chase purpose, not money, and stay disciplined enough to still be here in ten years.
Ryan's sharpest warning is about motive. He once set a goal to hit a million dollars by a certain age, reached it, then lost it a year later because he kept pushing for the dollar. The businesses he most admires now are the disciplined ones: save half of what is left after payroll, invest the other half, repeat for a decade. You do not need a nine-figure exit or even a ten-million-dollar company; a three-million-dollar business run patiently for ten or fifteen years can build lasting, generational wealth. The trap is social media's compression of time, the sense that success has to arrive tomorrow. His reframe echoes an old line he loves: we overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten.
Framework: The Generational Pendulum
The Story Ryan Told
Ryan does not hide the failures. For every success people see, he says, there are probably ten or twenty behind it. Even his speaking business runs on rejection: he reaches out to roughly a hundred people to land three engagements, which means 97 no's for every yes. In the operating years he lived through employee embezzlement, lawsuits over things his companies did not do wrong, and mass layoffs when the cash ran out. There were months he was not sure he could make payroll, calling clients to beg them to pull invoices forward.
The lesson he keeps coming back to is the one that cost him the most. He hit his early money goal and then watched it disappear because the money had become the point. Now he measures differently. He talks about three cyclical phases of a life and career, grinding, then growing, then giving, and says he is finally in the giving one: writing every week, sharing what he got right and, more often, what he got wrong. The through-line is simple. When money is the main thing, the business gets into the stickiest situations. When purpose is, it tends to last.
Standout Quotes
Anyone that pursues money as their main measure of success ultimately fails.
For every one success you see, there's probably 10 or 20 failures behind that.
When money becomes the main thing, almost every time I see those businesses get in the stickiest situations.
The most important thing is not business. It's family and the relationships that you have, because that's something that you can't buy.
I see the airport, I see the inside of a cab, I see the inside of my hotel room, I see an audience, and I leave.
Frameworks & Ideas Referenced
- The Generational Pendulum : History repeats itself and there is nothing new under the sun; innovation swings back and forth like a pendulum, and leaders who read the swing move earlier.
- The Generational Prism implied : The lens behind Ryan's Collide newsletter: read each generation, from the silent generation to Gen Beta, by its age and moment before its label.
Books, People & Sources Mentioned
- Jeff Bezos, on an AWS stage : His reframe that Ryan builds on: stop asking what the future will look like and ask what is not going to change.
- Barnes & Noble is opening 60 new locations : Ryan's Collide essay on why Gen Z demand is pushing a bookstore to expand its physical footprint.
- Gen Z is going back to the mall : Ryan's Collide essay on the return to in-person retail and experience.
- Starbucks is investing in larger, living-room-style stores : Closing smaller international locations to double down on comfortable, in-person spaces.
- The Collide newsletter grew more than 20x in nine months : Ryan's weekly essay on the generations, from the silent generation to Gen Beta; he also narrates an audio version each week.
- Larry Long Jr. : A mutual friend who first connected Ryan and Vincent, and who is traveling to Scotland to work with Vincent.
Keep Exploring
- The Future Is Born: Gen Beta has arrived collide
- Gen Z is ungrounded and going back to the mall collide
- Gen Z inspired Barnes & Noble to open 60 new locations collide
- What we lost when life got easier collide
- Ryan Vet on Workforce Alchemist: generational change, AI, and workplace friction press
- Ryan Vet on A Geek Leader: AI and cognitive erosion press
- Ryan Vet on The Human Factor: the generational fault lines of transformation press
- Keynote: A Familiar Future speaking
- Keynote: When Generations Collide speaking
Ryan writes one free essay a week. It's called Collide.
How generations are reshaping work and home. Practical, research-backed, and delivered weekly. Read it at RyanVet.com/collide.
