A new beginning awaits

There’s a strange feeling when you finally close a chapter you already emotionally moved on from years ago.

As some of you know, last month, one of our longest-standing and most profitable portfolio companies officially completed its final closing after an exit process that started back in January. In theory, it should have felt like a milestone moment.

Instead, it felt like clarity.

Because truthfully, I’ve been waiting for this chapter to close for almost two years now.

Not because the business wasn’t successful. It was.

But because over the last few years, I started seeing patterns that became impossible to ignore.

The world started moving faster than the systems around it.
The noise got louder.
The incentives got stranger.
Everyone suddenly became an “AI company.”
And somewhere along the way, people stopped asking whether technology was actually solving meaningful problems or simply creating another layer of optimization around systems already breaking underneath.

Over the last seven years, our team at 77Labs invested deeply into building our own infrastructure, AI systems, automation tooling, operational workflows, and data engines that we integrated directly into real businesses.

Not demos.
Not wrappers.
Not AI for the sake of AI.

Real businesses with staffing shortages, operational complexity, fragmented systems, margin pressure, inventory issues, and constantly moving environments.

And for a long time, we became very good at that game.

We became very good at modernizing legacy operations.
Very good at spotting opportunities hidden inside overlooked industries.
Very good at using technology to create leverage where others couldn’t see it.

But somewhere along the way, we got pulled further away from what made building exciting in the first place.

We lost the ability to stay lean.
To stay dangerous.
To stay deeply curious.

We didn’t have the freedom anymore to simply be a small group of killers obsessing over one meaningful problem from the ground up.

So we’re retiring those hats.

And honestly, it feels good.

Over the last month, I’ve spent time speaking with operators far outside the world of technology, people running industries that most of Silicon Valley (besides a few good ones) would probably never pay attention to unless someone found a way to label it “AI for X.”

The people keeping manufacturing assembly lines moving despite shrinking labor pools.
The operators maintaining aging infrastructure that entire cities quietly depend on.
The healthcare groups trying to balance burnout, staffing shortages, and rising demand.
The logistics and industrial businesses still held together more by human coordination and experience than software.
The skilled trades operators watching decades of institutional knowledge disappear faster than it can be replaced.

The deeper I went into these conversations, the more obvious something became: the real problems were never purely technological.

Technology itself is not the value.
Efficiency alone is not the value.

The real challenge is human adaptation.

How humans adapt to systems changing faster than their ability to emotionally, socially, and economically process them.

And once I realized that, it became hard to care about building another small efficiency layer simply because the market wanted it.

So by the end of this year, we’ll either fully liquidate the remaining 77Labs portfolio or shut down the companies that no longer fit where we believe the world is heading.

And we’re going back to something much simpler: finding one problem that actually matters.

Because what moves us today is very different than what moved us seven years ago.

The next decade is not just going to create technological disruption.
It’s going to create loneliness.
Isolation.
Identity loss tied to work.
Mental health decline.
Economic displacement.
And a growing gap between the speed of systems and the speed at which humans can realistically adapt.

At the same time, we’re also facing labor shortages across the exact industries required to keep nations operational and resilient.

That contradiction feels impossible to ignore.

We are simultaneously automating society while lacking enough humans in the industries we actually need to survive.

That has become the problem we care about most.

Not just where jobs disappear.
But where purpose comes from.
How people transition.
How they learn.
How they adapt.
How they stay emotionally functional while the world underneath them keeps accelerating.

Recently I was gifted the book How Progress Ends, and one idea from it stayed with me:

The danger is usually not the technology itself. Humanity has survived every major technological shift before. The real challenge is the speed at which change compounds faster than institutions, education systems, labor markets, and people can realistically process and adapt to it.

That feels incredibly true right now.

The issue is not AI.
It was never just AI.
It will never only be this wave.

The issue is velocity.

And most people are not being given the support systems, pathways, or tools needed to navigate that velocity in a healthy way.

Which brings me back to the title of this piece: A new beginning awaits.

Not just for us, honestly, but for a lot of people right now.

The Legacy Playbook and Anti-Status Quo started as a conversations around modernization, operational leverage, doing things differently to build and sustain resilient businesses.

But somewhere along the way, it became much more about people than technology.

This next chapter for us will be smaller.
More focused.
More uncomfortable.
More curious.
More human.

We want to spend time understanding industries we know nothing about yet.
We want to get closer to operators.
Closer to labor.
Closer to infrastructure.
Closer to the systems quietly powering society every single day.

And ultimately, we want to build things that help people navigate change instead of simply accelerating it.

More importantly, we’re entering this chapter with openness.

Openness to ideas.
Openness to industries we’ve never touched.
Openness to operators who see the world differently than we do.
Openness to learning from people outside of technology entirely.

So if you’re building something meaningful, operating inside an industry we should better understand, or believe there’s something important worth learning, please please reach out.

Seriously.

At this stage, I’m far less interested in polished pitches or grand ideas and far more interested in real problems, real operators, and real perspectives.

We may not have all the answers yet.

But we will absolutely listen.

To everyone who has supported me and read every newsletter over the years, thank you.

Some of you have been here since the very beginning.
Some became collaborators, operators, customers, investors, and friends.
Some challenged my thinking in ways that shaped major decisions in both business and life.

Ironically, this newsletter about business and technology ended up teaching me far more about people than systems.

This chapter is closing.

But for the first time in a long time, that no longer feels sad to me.

It feels honest.

A new beginning awaits. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

With love,
Yoela