"Sam Altman, Meet Frank"

On June 30, Thinking Machines Lab, led by ex‑OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, raised a $2 billion seed at a mind-blowing $12 billion valuation.

Much more quietly, an S&P Global Market Intelligence survey of enterprise IT leaders found the share of companies abandoning the majority of their generative‑AI pilot projects rose from 17% in 2024 to 42% in 2025.

These two headlines seem incongruent. Why would AI valuations be skyrocketing when AI customers are abandoning their AI projects?

I think I have an answer. I share it here

For every Jensen Huang and Sam Altman there’s a ‘Frank.’

Frank is a bloated SVP who runs a $9B business from a corner office, with a filing cabinet, and a fax machine. His secretary prints his emails.

Jensen and Sam wave the flag of FOMO—progress, hype, exponential growth.
Frank carries the flag of FOLP, Fear of Losing Power.

FOMO fuels innovation. But FOLP runs the place.

Inside every bank, law firm, consultancy, oil giant, and federal agency, Frank is the gatekeeper and the power broker. He doesn’t inherently hate innovation. But if it threatens his fiefdom he’ll kill it. And at some point, he’ll always feel threatened by it. And most of the time, Frank wins.

Frank is why your banking app sucks.
Frank is why it’s harder to file an insurance claim now than in 1997.
Frank is why for every four AI executives hired by the major banks since 2022 they’ve lost five. Most would rather take a pay cut than spend another year fighting Frank.

Frank is the gravity that will eventually drag AI’s hypersonic flight back to earth.
He’s why this bubble will burst.

But this post isn’t a rant or a warning. It’s a manual. It’s for anyone who is determined to make great technology accomplish great things in an institution that needs to evolve but wants to stay the same.

AI has real power. The investment banker working 90 hours a week moving data from PDFs to Excel to PowerPoint needs AI. So does every analyst stuck writing memos, every customer service rep with three screens, every brand manager rewriting the same product copy 47 times.

The real, urgent work is empowering the people trying to use AI to unfu*k broken businesses and build better ones. And that means knowing how to deal with Frank.

I’ve launched over 33 new businesses inside the Fortune 500. I’ve gotten to know Frank very well. Frank shows up in five forms:

Frank gains power in rooms where ideas are pitched via PowerPoint. Don’t pitch ideas. Pitch outcomes. Build something minimal, get traction, then ask to scale. Then it’s more of a risk for Frank to say no, then to say yes.

Frank warns you'll piss off Legal, Compliance, or Brand. The solution is to Co-create with the cops. Get them in early, before they show up in riot gear.

Frank loves this one. (When I was leading product innovation at Bloomberg, a particularly malignant Frank would say, “That’s not the Bloomberg way.”) Find a respected veteran to broker a peace deal between you and Frank.

Frank guards customer access like a Rottweiler. Because if you grow the account, his mediocrity gets exposed. Always have alternate routes to market. The innovator who is undiversified is blocked.

Here, Frank might be right. Innovation must come with a clear, investor-defensible business case. How will it grow revenue, cut costs, or mitigate risk? And in what time frame?

The best products I’ve ever helped launch didn’t happen because we steamrolled Frank.
They happened because we anticipated him. We engaged him.
Sometimes we even converted him.

If you want AI to transform your organization, don’t just chase the hype. Learn how to navigate the Frank Terrain. Because the biggest threat to progress isn't a lack of tech. It's a surplus of politics.

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