Maon Seidel
Founder and CEO · Ecommerce Counsel
Cape Town, South Africa
I interviewed the man I work for over two sittings on a Thursday evening, and he spent the first ten minutes explaining why the middle of the labour market is being hollowed out using a marrow bone. He is Gen X, he runs an agency with no offices, and he has never once softened a thing to make me feel better about it.
Why we spoke
I wanted somebody who signs the invoices. Most of the people I spoke to for this book are describing the shift from inside their own job, which is the honest place to stand, but Maon is the one who has to decide who gets hired, who gets carried, and what happens to the person who has stopped moving while everybody around him got faster. He had also read the early drafts, which meant I could not get away with anything.
What they brought to the book
He gave me the mechanism I was missing. I had spent a year describing the squeeze on average work and had no account of why people do not simply step out of it, and in one evening he handed me three: inertia, the fear of failure, and the fear of success, which is the one nobody puts their hand up for. He also gave me the ad agency job bag, which is the clearest picture I have of what an apprenticeship actually was before anybody thought to name it, and a number for how often he catches the machine lying to him.
The key insight
That average is not a resting place any more, it is a direction of travel. His argument is not that the machines take the work. It is that the work stays and the value of being merely alright at it disappears, so standing still now moves you backwards relative to everybody who did not. And underneath that, the reason people stay put has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with what a person is prepared to be expected to do next time.
Maon Seidel was born in the 1970s and founded Ecommerce Counsel, an agency that manages marketplace businesses across Amazon and the rest of it, and that has never had an office. He came up through the media side of the advertising world in the 1990s, selling into agencies rather than working inside one, which is how he ended up with a better view of them than most of the people who worked there. He is a Gen X CEO who still builds his own spreadsheets at eleven at night, plays golf badly enough to have bought data about it, and is unembarrassed about any of it.
It was ten past eight on a Thursday evening and we were recording on my phone, which is not how you are supposed to conduct a serious interview, and about twenty seconds in he told me I had already made my own argument for me and could I please stop being coy about it. Then he asked whether we were the air or the bone, and I did not have an answer, and I said something about how it probably depends on the industry, which is the noise a person makes while buying time.
He had read the drafts. That is the thing about interviewing the man you work for: there is no version of the conversation where you get to control the frame.
We went for nearly two hours across two sittings and he took me somewhere I was not expecting, which was a physical canvas bag in an advertising agency in the 1990s. Everything a client had ever produced lived in it: hand-drawn storyboards, mixed colours, strategy, frame-by-frame. It moved around the building on foot, and the person carrying it was usually eighteen and also making the coffee. He was clear that carrying the bag was not the job. “They then picked up on what was going on in an agency world by osmosis,” he said, and then the sentence I have quoted at three different people since: “None of that experience is available anymore.”
He does not think anybody decided to remove it. Email removed it. There is no bag, there are no filing cabinets, there are frequently no departments, and there is certainly no six-to-eighteen-month window in which a young person’s mistakes cost the business nothing. That window is the whole of an apprenticeship and it went quietly, the way the good teaspoons go.
He is not a doom merchant about it, which is the part that makes him useful. He is a man who cross-references his own AI-built spreadsheets down to the number that should match the bank account, finds mistakes about seventy percent of the time, and can only find them because he built the things by hand for twenty years first. He is also honest that he has lost weeks to prompting and that frustration is now a daily feature of his working life, which is not a sentence most chief executives will say into a recorder.
And when I asked him what happens to the person who has simply stayed the same while everybody around them got better, he did not reach for a training plan. He reached for two fears. The fear of failure, which everybody expects, and the fear of success, which nobody admits to. “I’ll cruise at a C,” he said, doing the voice of a boy who has worked out that an A once means an A forever. “Then there’s no expectation of me.”
He runs a fully remote company and still cannot name the thing he needs from people, though he knows it is not hours and it is not output. He found the word later, accidentally, talking about golf: a simulator will tell him precisely what his hands did, and he will still drive out to a real course every Saturday he can, because on a real course you play the shot and then it is over.
Somewhere in the second sitting he mentioned a friend who was told, on his first day in rehab, that ninety percent of the room would fail, and then told that all of them could be in the other ten. The statistic held. That is the whole of Maon's argument, really: the odds describe the room, and the room has never once been a person.