Agency Might Be All That Matters
Scarcity in a world of cheap intelligence
This is Startup Pirate #132, a newsletter about startups, technology, and entrepreneurship. Made in Greece. If you’re not a subscriber, click the button below:
Agency Might Be All That Matters
I was raised to believe that academic excellence was the thing that mattered. I studied hard, got good grades, entered a reputable university, and then pursued more degrees to specialise. A master’s, a PhD left unfinished. Like many of my generation, I internalised the bargain: academic excellence was a proxy for intelligence, and intelligence was a proxy for value.
If you performed well in structured systems, admissions tests, and interview loops, you were smart and capable. That was the ticket to Big Tech, Big 4, Big Pharma, or whatever version of prestige your tribe respected. Then the script continued: work hard, stay late, learn the politics, get a bonus, get promoted. A work life that begins pre-scripted by someone else and stays that way for years. The company provides direction, and you provide execution.
For a long time, that bargain worked. The economy needed a huge number of people who were good at well-defined games. A junior engineer did not need to decide what should exist if they could execute tickets. A consultant did not need to invent the work if they could structure slides and survive the hours. A lawyer did not need unusual originality if they could process documents and reason carefully.
But that world is starting to crack.
AI is getting very good at the kind of work we used to treat as scarce. The latest models score extremely well on benchmarks designed for PhD-level science, broad university-level knowledge, and professional reasoning. Whether or not you trust every benchmark, it is clear that models are becoming good at producing reliable cognitive labour across domains that used to require years of training, eating into the bounded, delegated execution that many white-collar careers thrived on.
As AI takes on more execution, the question shifts from “can they do the work?” to “can they decide what work is worth doing?” Can they decide which messy problems are worth the AI’s infinite, cheap labour? That is agency.
Agency is easy to describe but rare to find: it is the disposition to notice what matters, care enough to act, even when nobody asks you to, even when it is uncomfortable, and even when the outcome is uncertain. This is neither assertiveness nor ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal.
People have always admired this trait, even if we did not always organise our institutions around it. In Greek mythology, Prometheus defied Zeus by stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans, along with the possibility of craft, technology, and civilisation. He did not accept the world as given. He changed the conditions of human life, despite the brutality of the punishment.
Tech has its own versions of grand agency stories. In Airbnb’s early days, when investors kept rejecting them, the founders designed and sold election-themed cereal boxes, Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s, to keep the company alive.
What makes this uncomfortable is that many of us were trained by the old bargain. I certainly was. If you kept proving you were smart inside the system, the system would keep rewarding you. And for a while, it did.
But a lot of what we treated as intelligence was really scarcity. Scarcity of training, credentials, and people who could write, code, analyse, summarise, model, and reason at a professional level. AI goes straight at that scarcity.
This is why many highly credentialed people are about to feel strangely exposed. Not because they are not capable, but because a growing share of what made them valuable can now be done by models. The question is no longer just whether you can perform well inside a system. It is whether you can create motion when the system has not yet told you what to do.
AI will not benefit everyone equally. Give a high-agency person better tools, and they become dramatically more powerful. Give a low-agency person the same tools, and they mostly become better at producing polished inertia. The advantage will increasingly belong to the agent deployer and manager, the person who knows where to point models, how to structure workflows around them, and how to turn cheap intelligence into real leverage.
Prometheus mattered not because he reasoned better inside the existing order, but because he refused to leave it as he found it. He took fire from the gods and gave humans leverage.
In a world full of cheap intelligence, agency might be the only thing that matters.
Top News
New site with Startup Jobs in Greece
Startup Pirate is back with a new website, and it’s packed with hundreds of open roles at startups in Greece from 70 teams actively hiring. Check it out here and let me know if there are startups we should include!
Greek AI mafia is real (cont’d)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the world’s #2 AI conference, is taking place this month in Brazil. ~ 5% of accepted oral papers feature at least one Greek co-author (15 researchers in total), with affiliations including Archimedes, Meta Superintelligence Labs, Google Cloud, UC Berkeley, and ETH Zurich. Research topics span vision-aware LLMs, faster AI agents, benchmarking coding assistants, synthetic data, and more.
Welcome Pickups partners with Airbnb
Airbnb recently rolled out a new category for airport pickups across 125 cities, and they’ve partnered with Welcome Pickups to power it. That means users can now book private rides in places like Paris, Bali, and Mexico City. Big moment for Alexandros Trimis, Savvas Georgiou, and the team who’ve quietly built a platform now serving 375+ destinations and over 3 million travellers a year.
Open Coffee Athens, Greeks In Tech (Boston/NYC), and more
We’ve got a few things coming up:
Greeks In Tech NYC on April 20 (RSVP)
Greeks In Tech Boston on April 21 (RSVP)
Open Coffee Athens on May 8 (RSVP)
Also worth flagging: the Panathēnea team is putting together a big tech & culture festival in Athens (May 27–29), featuring 70+ side events and speakers from companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Runway, Index Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. And if you’re in Patras, there’s also an upcoming event on Lightning Network and AI project management by Patras Tech Talk on April 29.
Fundings
Resolve AI, a startup that helps enterprises make their infrastructure more reliable, raised $40M at a $1.5B valuation led by DST Global and Salesforce Ventures.
Swarm Aero, a developer of large uncrewed aerial vehicle swarms, announced a $35M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures.
Edra emerged from stealth with $30M from Sequoia, 8VC, and A*, aiming to use AI to analyse organisational data and reverse-engineer instructions to train agents and models.
AI-powered learning platform Gizmo, with 13 million users across 120+ countries, raised a $22M Series A led by Shine Capital.
KEWAZO, a robotics company building lifting robots for vertical material transport at industrial sites, raised a $16M Series A, bringing total funding to over $35M. Read my conversation with Eirini Psallida here.
Genetic engineering platform Neion Bio emerged from stealth with $11M led by Caffeinated Capital.
Wikifarmer, a B2B AgTech startup using AI to connect food businesses with producers, raised €7.1M to fuel global expansion, led by Brighteye Ventures and Piraeus Bank. Read my conversation with Ilias Sousis here.
AI-powered genetic screening company gMendel raised a €1.2M Seed round led by Metavallon VC.
Diffraqtion, building quantum camera technology for earth and space intelligence, secured additional funding in its Pre-Seed round. Read my conversation with Johannes Galatsanos here.
AI nutrition tracking Qalzy raised a Pre-Seed round from Jenson Ventures.
Althyna received a grant from the Helidoni Foundation to make homes safer and help prevent falls among older adults in Greece.
Business management platform Workadu raised funding from angel investors.
Acquisitions
Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M+, expanding into AI-driven biological research.
Gusto acquired Mosey to strengthen its compliance offering for small businesses.
New Funds
EOS Capital Partners completed the final close of its €250M EOS Hellenic Renaissance Fund II to back Greek growth-stage companies.
Sporos Platform announced its final close with €58M to back startups and projects across the green economy.
That’s a wrap, thank you for reading! If you liked it, give it a 👍 and share.
Alex