Eko Weekly Round-Up 9/19/25

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September 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

🧠 Insights You Won’t Forget

Today's insights are compiled from the past week!

  1. Labor automation as the wedge

    AI’s first target is the $100bn+ global labor market of analysts, associates, lawyers, and ops staff. By automating undifferentiated heavy lifting, data extraction, memo writing, redlining, AI frees human capital for intuition, creativity, and relationship-building.

  2. Enduring moats: access, proprietary data, and ops excellence

    As AI becomes ubiquitous, advantages shift toward trust-based deal access, truly proprietary datasets legible to AI, and operational leverage at portfolio companies. Automation will dilute sourcing edge; winning will depend on what can’t be copied.

  3. From alpha to infrastructure

    First movers gain short-term edge from faster diligence, sourcing, and pricing. But just like indexing rose after Bloomberg, AI advantages will erode as adoption spreads. Tomorrow’s infrastructure will be built on today’s alpha experiments.

  4. The Work is the Win

    Billy’s book thesis: do the work for its own sake, not for outcomes. Drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, he frames mastery as being “utterly dedicated and utterly detached”, committed to the process while releasing outcome obsession.

  5. Get to Boring

    Borrowing from Ben Gibbard and Adam Mastroianni, Billy stresses that fulfillment comes from enjoying the mundane mechanics of a craft (like picking coffee beans or rewriting drafts). If you don’t enjoy the daily grind, you won’t enjoy the career.

  6. Be Great Regardless

    Stories of John Mayer and Harry Belafonte show the power of excellence in interim or unwanted roles. By taking even “side” work seriously, they unlocked breakthrough opportunities they couldn’t have predicted.

  7. Two-Speed Economy and Labor Divide

    Labor market revisions reveal hundreds of thousands fewer jobs than previously reported, with under-$50k earners facing job-finding conditions reminiscent of the GFC. Youth unemployment rises while older Americans retire early on asset wealth. This structural divide reinforces inequality and long-term social instability.

  8. Productivity Boom Masked by Inflation and Politics

    AI and robotics generate massive productivity gains in output, but with fewer workers. This disconnect, booming corporate efficiency versus stagnant employment, creates both macro growth illusions and political pressure for redistribution, UBI-style policies, or forced nominal growth.

💡 Eko Worth Remembering

“In an era that proclaims diversity while division grows more intense, conveying to the world the message that ‘even so, a diverse world can be connected’ represents a kinds of hope for the world, and the future.”

Mori Minoru

🛤️ Off the Record

Happy Friday! I have been enjoying my time in Japan. Filled with great food, people and experiences. The experience that has stood out to me the most was my visit to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Mori Minoru is a Japanese real-estate developer who founded the Roppongi Hills complex and established the Mori Art Museum in 2003; he believed that “culture shapes a city’s identity,” and set up the museum to foster contemporary international art and make it accessible within Tokyo’s urban life. If you ever have the chance to go I highly recommend it.

Resonant City 2025 was my favorite exhibit meant to question the nature of future architecture. Developed by architect Sou Fujimoto in collaboration with data scientist Hiroaki Miyata from Keio University, the project envisions a future metropolis composed of interconnected spherical structures of various sizes, reaching a total height of approximately 500 meters. This city is designed as a complex, layered system without a central hub, where the spheres open in multiple directions to facilitate three-dimensional connections, creating a new paradigm for community life. The concept draws a direct parallel to a forest ecosystem, emphasizing multiplicity, resilience, and interconnectivity over hierarchical structures. The vision integrates enhanced mobility, energy generation, and digital technology, proposing a city that functions like a living, responsive organism.

While there are so many issues these days, its refreshing to think about new perspectives on how should build for the future.

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