Enshittification Explains Everything Wrong With Tech Right Now | Sayre Blake | Ep06

**What happens when a classically trained illustrator and electrical engineer decides the answer to AI's biggest problems isn't more data, it's less?** **Sayre Blake is the CEO and technical founder of SkillSaige, a soft-skills training platform that reimagines corporate learning as an actual video game, built by someone who's directed shipped titles, built enterprise VR training, and helped brands escape "five stock illustrations from 2019" territory. Her AI-powered trainer, Sage, runs a 15-minute conversation on a fraction of the compute most chatbots burn, using less power, she says, than streaming 15 minutes of Netflix, while being explicitly designed to never remember you, bond with you, or pretend to be more than a character in a story.** **In this episode, we get into:** - **Why "enshittification" isn't inevitable. It's a choice companies keep making anyway** - **The theater training principle Sayre used to build AI boundaries that actually hold** - **Why "good-ish" AI might be more dangerous than AI that's just bad** - **The real math behind AI's power problem, and why she thinks the current data center boom won't survive contact with reality** - **Running a lean, remote-first company without a "corporate culture" clause** - **Why she calls most public vulnerability "performative honesty," and why that's a problem** **Sayre also gets brutally honest about the state of SaaS, the video game industry's identity crisis, and why she's not "socially digestible" enough to run for president (her words), but might be building something more useful than a campaign anyway.** **Pull quotes:** **"It's almost more dangerous than being outright bad, because it encourages you to keep trying."** **"We could do this with twelve people instead of twelve hundred."** **This is a conversation about building tech that knows its own limits, and why that restraint might be the most radical business strategy in the room.** **Watch this episode on our YouTube channel:**  https://youtu.be/t7rvmfvYE\_I **Subscribe on Spotify:** https://open.spotify.com/show/2PuNBpWpZKzCnuwmFQOPI4?si=97a26df7e350478a **Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:** https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/onlyfounders/id1832541527 **Follow Anne Gillaspie on Instagram:** https://www.instagram.com/annegillaspie/ **Follow Anne Gillaspie on LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/annegillaspie/ **Visit our website:** https://theannegillaspie.com/  **If this conversation resonated with you, subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with another founder who needs to hear it.**