What does the next era of leverage look like?

I’ve been thinking a lot about leverage lately. The real thing. The structural force that determines why some people, some companies, some entire civilizations end up shaping the world while others just participate in it.

It started with a question I couldn’t shake: if leverage is the most powerful force in economic history, and if it shifts form every few generations, then what does the next shift look like? And more selfishly, am I positioned anywhere near it?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. But I’ve been studying the pattern, going back about five hundred years, and what I keep finding is that the people who won big in each era weren’t necessarily the smartest or the hardest working. They were the ones who recognized the new form of leverage before it became obvious.

So let me walk through what I’ve found.

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The Voyage That Changed the Math

In 1484, a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus walked into the Portuguese court with a pitch: fund a western sea route to Asia. King John II listened, consulted his advisors, and said no. The math was wrong. Columbus had underestimated the circumference of the Earth by about 25%.

He spent the next eight years pitching. Portugal rejected him. Spain’s scholars rejected him. He was about to try France when, in early 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella finally said yes. They’d just conquered Granada. They had momentum, a little cash, and the appetite for a bet.

The total investment came to roughly two million maravedis, maybe five to ten million dollars in today’s money. A meaningful sum, but not a kingdom-ending one. Columbus negotiated himself 10% of all profits from whatever he found, the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and governorship of any new lands. All of it hereditary.

Then they waited. Months at sea. No updates. No feedback loop. Just capital deployed into the unknown.

Columbus never reached Asia. He died believing he had. But what he actually did was far more consequential. He stumbled into an entirely new map. And over the next 150 years, roughly 1500 to 1650, Spain extracted massive amounts of gold and silver from the Americas, from mines like Potosí in Bolivia and others across Mexico and Peru, and shipped it all back to Spain. The return on that two million maravedis was, by any measure, one of the greatest in human history.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to: before this, wealth mostly came from inheritance, conquest, or controlling existing trade routes. Columbus introduced something new. Capital deployed against uncertainty, not certainty, could expand the map itself.

The explorers got the fame. But the real leverage belonged to the people who understood the structure of the bet. And a century later, that understanding evolved into something even more powerful.

When Leverage Became a Product

In 1602, Dutch merchants did something no one had done before. They created the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, and sold shares in it to the public. Over 1,100 investors bought in during the first offering. One of them was a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis. There was no minimum investment.

Think about what that meant. A century earlier, you needed to be a monarch to fund a voyage. Now, a domestic worker in Amsterdam could buy a piece of one. The joint-stock company had turned leverage itself into a product.

At its peak, the VOC was valued at what historians estimate to be $7-8 trillion in modern dollars. It maintained a private army of 260,000 soldiers, larger than most European nations’ militaries. It had the authority to negotiate treaties, build forts, and wage war.

The structure was the innovation. Not the ships. Not the spices. The structure. Risk distributed across thousands of small investors rather than concentrated in a single crown. That template, the publicly traded corporation, is still the dominant vehicle for leverage five centuries later.

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The Interface Play

I want to pause on something I noticed while reading about the British Empire, because it changed how I think about leverage entirely.

Britain was a small, damp island. It controlled a quarter of the world’s population and a quarter of its land mass. The usual narrative is conquest. But if you look at how it actually worked, the pattern is more subtle.

The British East India Company didn’t start by owning territory. It started by controlling trade interfaces. Ports. Shipping routes. Tax collection rights. In 1765, the Mughal Emperor granted the Company dewani, the right to collect taxes, in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. Not ownership of the land. Just the right to collect from it. Indian subjects paid £22.7 million per year directly to the Company.

Admiral Sir John Fisher once listed what he called the “Five Keys to the World”: the Strait of Dover, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Cape of Good Hope. Five chokepoints. Britain controlled all of them. Not the continents they connected, just the passages between them.

This was, I think, the first large-scale derivative economy. You didn’t own the asset. You owned the yield.

The human suffering was immense, and I don’t want to minimize that. But from a purely structural perspective, it revealed something that keeps showing up in every leverage era since: control the interface, and you control the value that flows through it.

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Building the Map Instead of Expanding It

The industrial era inverted the model. Instead of controlling routes between places, the new leverage was in building the infrastructure that made places function.

John D. Rockefeller understood this better than maybe anyone in history. He didn’t try to own oil wells. Wells were risky, unpredictable, subject to the chaos of discovery. Instead, he focused on refining. By 1900, Standard Oil controlled 90% of America’s oil refining capacity but only about 14% of crude supply. The wells were someone else’s problem. The processing layer, the interface between raw material and usable product, was his.

His tactics were ruthless. In early 1872, within three months, he bought out or bankrupted 22 of 26 competing refineries in Cleveland. He negotiated railroad discounts by promising 60 carloads per day, volume leverage that smaller competitors couldn’t match. He bought up barrel makers, chemical suppliers, even the train cars themselves. By controlling every link in the chain between well and consumer, he made competition structurally impossible.

Andrew Carnegie did the same thing with steel. He didn’t just make steel, he owned the iron mines in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, the coal fields, the coke ovens, the transport fleet, and the mills in Pittsburgh. Full vertical integration. By 1900, Carnegie Steel produced more steel than all of Great Britain. When J.P. Morgan bought him out, the price was $480 million, creating the world’s first billion-dollar corporation in U.S. Steel.

Cornelius Vanderbilt played the same game with railroads. When New York City resisted his consolidation in 1867, he simply moved his Hudson River Railroad terminus to East Albany, cutting the city off. They capitulated immediately. He understood that whoever controls the infrastructure doesn’t need permission from anyone who depends on it.

These weren’t adventurers. They were builders. And the leverage wasn’t in discovering new territory, it was in becoming the chokepoint of existing territory. What’s interesting is that this playbook isn’t just history. Someone is running it right now, in real time, on a continent most investors still underestimate.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer. For decades, the country exported crude and imported it back as refined gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. The import bill ran to $23 billion a year by 2022, consuming roughly 40% of the country’s foreign exchange earnings. An oil-producing nation, spending almost half its dollar reserves buying back its own product in finished form. That’s not an economy. That’s a dependency.

Aliko Dangote looked at that and saw exactly what Rockefeller saw in 1870. The wells weren’t the chokepoint. The refinery was.

In May 2023, he opened the Dangote Refinery in Lagos. 650,000 barrels per day. The largest single-train refinery in the world. Cost: $19 billion, the biggest private industrial investment in African history. By early 2025, it supplied over 60% of Nigeria’s petrol and represented two-thirds of the country’s total refining capacity. He’s already announced plans to expand to 1.4 million barrels per day, which would make it the largest refinery on earth.

But the refinery isn’t where Dangote started. He started with cement. Nigeria had limestone everywhere but almost no cement industry. The country was importing bags of finished cement from overseas at massive markup. Dangote built local plants. Today, Dangote Cement holds 61% of the Nigerian market and operates across ten African countries with over 52 million tonnes of annual capacity. Nigeria now saves an estimated $3 billion a year from not importing cement.

Then sugar. Dangote Sugar Refinery in Lagos, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, processes raw cane into finished white sugar and controls over 70% of the Nigerian market. Then fertilizer, a $2.5 billion urea plant, the largest in Africa, 3 million tonnes a year, which launched right as the Russia-Ukraine war disrupted global fertilizer supply.

The pattern is identical every time. Africa exports raw materials. The world processes them. Africa buys back the finished product at ten times the cost. Dangote inserts himself as the processing layer and captures the margin that had been flowing overseas.

Carnegie controlled the interface between iron ore and the railroads that built America. Rockefeller controlled the interface between crude oil and the lamps and engines that powered it. Dangote is controlling the interface between African raw materials and African consumers. The playbook hasn’t changed. The geography has.

His net worth roughly doubled to $24 billion once the refinery went from construction to operation. The wealth didn’t come from discovering a resource or inventing a technology. It came from positioning himself at the chokepoint between what Africa produces and what Africa consumes. That’s leverage.

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Code Changes Everything

Then came software. And the rules changed again.

In August 2011, Marc Andreessen published an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Software Is Eating the World.” His argument was that software companies were replacing traditional industries’ fundamental economics. Distribution costs collapsed. Scale went exponential. A teenager in a dorm room could reach billions of people for essentially zero marginal cost.

What Andreessen described was real, but I think Naval Ravikant articulated the deeper shift more precisely. In his now-famous 2018 tweetstorm, he wrote:

“Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.”

That word, “permissionless,” is the key. Every prior form of leverage required someone’s permission. Columbus needed a queen. The VOC needed investors. Rockefeller needed railroads. But code? Code just needed to work. You didn’t need to ask anyone.

Kevin Kelly saw this coming even earlier. In 2008, he published “1,000 True Fans,” an essay arguing that a creator needed only a thousand people willing to spend $100 a year to make a living. No label. No publisher. No gatekeeper. Direct-to-fan distribution through the internet meant the interface between creator and audience had been permanently disintermediated.

The leverage formula shifted from capital and infrastructure to code and networks. And for the first time in history, it was available to individuals.

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The Attention Shift

Then something interesting happened. Content became infinite. And attention became scarce.

Herbert Simon predicted this in 1971, long before the internet existed. In a paper called “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” he wrote:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

It took about forty years for that prediction to fully materialize. As of 2025, the average person spends nearly three hours per day on social media alone. For Gen Z, it’s over three hours. TikTok averages nearly an hour per user per day. YouTube about the same.

The smartest companies realized that the new chokepoint wasn’t servers or content or even devices. It was habit. Social platforms, streaming services, AI assistants, they’re not fighting for revenue first. They’re fighting for daily repetition. Because habit converts. Into belief. Into spending. Into identity.

Control attention, and you sit upstream of every other market. That’s the new interface.

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And Now, Intelligence

Which brings me to where I’ve been spending most of my time thinking. Because I believe we’re standing at another shift. And this one feels different from the others.

AI doesn’t just create a new interface. It abstracts human effort itself. Just as SaaS abstracted hardware, AI is abstracting the labor layer. You’re no longer hiring people to do work. You’re interfacing with intelligence directly.

The numbers are starting to tell the story. Midjourney, the AI image generation company, reportedly hit $200 million in annual revenue in 2023 with a team of around 40 people. Cursor, the AI coding tool, reached $500 million in annual recurring revenue with fewer than 50 employees. Levels IO (the twitter guy) built Interior AI, then Photo AI to millions in annual revenue. Alone.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has predicted that AI may soon enable a single person to operate a billion-dollar company. Sam Altman has talked about ten-person companies with billion-dollar valuations becoming normal. For context, the average AI unicorn in 2024 reached its billion-dollar valuation with about 200 employees in two years. Non-AI unicorns typically needed 400+ employees and nine years.

And here’s what makes this moment feel especially charged: we’re still at the very beginning. Despite all the noise, only about 3% of AI users actually pay for the tools. That’s roughly 0.7% of the world’s population. Pew Research found that only about 21% of US workers use AI in any capacity at work, and daily usage sits around 14% globally. The vast majority of the workforce hasn’t even started.

Which means if you’re already building on this layer, you’re not early in the way people were early to social media in 2010. You’re early in the way Rockefeller was early to refining in 1870, before anyone else realized where the real chokepoint would form.

The leverage multiplier is no longer geography. Not infrastructure. Not distribution. It’s capability. One person can now write like a content team, code like an engineering squad, analyze like a consulting firm, and design like an agency. The ratio of labor to output has been permanently altered.

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What I’m Still Working Out

I started this essay trying to answer a question about what the next era of leverage looks like. And I think the pattern is clear enough: every few generations, a new form of leverage emerges, and the people who position themselves near it early are the ones who shape what comes next.

Ships. Joint-stock companies. Trade routes. Railroads. Refineries. Code. Attention. And now, intelligence.

But here’s what I keep sitting with. Throughout all of this history, the most transformative ambition has never been about working harder within the existing system. It’s been about recognizing when the system is shifting and repositioning before it compounds. Junior developers ask me which programming language to learn. I always tell them the same thing: pick the one that’s emerging, not the one that’s dominant. Position yourself before the compound effect, not after.

In 1492, that meant backing the voyage. In 1602, it meant buying shares. In 1870, it meant controlling the refinery. In 2011, it meant writing software. In 2018, it meant building an audience.

And now? I think it means getting as close as possible to the intelligence layer. Not just using AI tools, but understanding what they make possible that wasn’t possible before. Building on top of them. Thinking in terms of capability, not headcount.

The ships are being built again. The maps are being redrawn. From the inside, it feels uncertain. From the outside, looking back, it will probably look inevitable.

I don’t have this fully figured out yet. But I know enough to know where I want to be standing when it compounds.