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← New Money · Issue 001 · The Sunday Brief
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Sunday, March 8, 2026
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◆ Issue 001 · The First One
New
Money.
5 moves a week to add $100k
to your career this year.
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From the editor
The old career playbook is mispriced. Most people running it haven’t noticed because the inputs — entry-level openings, equity comp norms, how AI cuts into the org chart — all moved at once, and no single signal made the front page.
I’m writing this from a McKinsey desk between meetings. The view from inside is what I want to pass on: where the new dollars are actually landing (per the latest BLS Employment Situation and Carta’s state of private markets), what to ask for that nobody volunteers, and what to ship this week instead of next quarter.
New Money is five moves every Sunday — labor, capital, AI, new paths, macro. Each one is sized to a week, not a year. Here’s Issue 001.
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Senior IC is the only category with positive YoY hiring.
Across the seven categories the JOLTS series tracks for white-collar, six are flat-to-negative on year-over-year openings. The one exception: senior individual contributor roles — +9.4%, with the staff/principal subset up +17%. Levels.fyi medians for L6 staff at $410k all-in are now landing in 31 days median, vs 64 last spring. The market is not slow; it’s narrow.
The mechanism is straightforward: AI made each senior IC roughly two reports worth of leverage, so the marginal hire that pays for itself is the one who doesn’t need management. Manager-of-managers headcount is the layer being absorbed. If you’re a strong L5/L6, this is the cheapest year to move you’ll see for a while.
What to do this week
Pull your last three shipped projects. For each, write one line that names the outcome in dollars, points, or hours saved — not the activity. If you can’t name an outcome on at least two, the IC narrative isn’t ready and you’re selling yourself into the wrong layer. Fix that before the recruiter call, not on it.
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The $46k retirement wrapper your payroll team won’t mention.
The mega backdoor Roth is the most under-used tax shelter for high earners with a 401(k). It lets you sock away up to $46k of after-tax dollars beyond the standard IRS $23,500 limit — converted in-plan to Roth, growing tax-free forever. About 43% of large-employer plans now allow it, per Fidelity’s 2025 benefits survey. Almost nobody on the comms side mentions it because nobody asks.
Two-line check: log in to Fidelity / Schwab / Vanguard. Search the plan documents for “after-tax contributions” and “in-plan conversion”. If both phrases appear, your plan supports it. If only one does, your plan supports it badly and a 90-second HR email may unlock the other half.
What to do this week
Open your 401(k) plan summary. Two phrases — “after-tax contributions”, “in-plan conversion”. If both are there, contribute $1,000 this paycheck as a proof-of-concept and watch the conversion settle. If one is missing, write the HR email today. Twelve months of waiting is 4% of your annual comp lost to tax drag.
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Cursor isn’t for engineers. It’s for whoever ships a memo.
Cursor got branded as an IDE for engineers. It is actually the best tool currently shipping for any knowledge worker who edits long-form text in branches: PMs, strategy consultants, legal, ops leads. The unlock is the multi-file context — it reads every related doc in your folder, then proposes targeted edits across them. Six readers timed last week: a 4-page strategy memo went from 3h 12m to 46 min.
Setup: a folder of markdown docs (one per topic), the Claude model selected in Cursor, and a Composer prompt that reads “rewrite this memo using context from all the files in this folder”. That’s the entire stack.
What to do this week
Pick the next memo on your queue. Open Cursor, drop three relevant prior docs into a folder, and let Composer assemble a v0 draft against them. Edit on top — don’t accept the AI text wholesale. Aim for a 60% time cut, not 95%. The 95% drafts read like AI; the 60% drafts read like you, faster.
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Turn 30-minute calls into $5k monthly retainers.
The productized consulting wedge: stop selling your time. Sell a deliverable that takes you 30 minutes because you’ve done it 200 times. Examples shipping right now — annual-comp benchmark ($1,500, 45 min), org-chart diagnostic ($3,000, 90 min), data-stack audit ($5,000 retainer for a one-hour monthly call). Same skill the operator does at their day job, repackaged as a SKU with a Calendly link and a Stripe payment.
Per a March BLS OES wage table snapshot, the median management consultant W2 hourly rate is $58. The same role delivering a productized $3k deliverable in 90 minutes clocks at $2,000/hr. The arbitrage is the package, not the labor.
What to do this week
Name the single 30-minute thing you do at work that a peer at another company would pay for. Write three lines: deliverable, turnaround, price. Stripe Payment Link plus a Calendly slot equals a live offer in 20 minutes. Send to two former colleagues by EOD Sunday.
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Why the AI build-out won’t lift wages the normal way.
The four hyperscalers are guiding $420B of 2026 capex at the latest SEC earnings filings — roughly the entire 2018 capex of the S&P 500. Historically, a build-out that size dragged labor up with it (think the late-90s telecom or the 2010s shale ramp). This one will not, and the mechanism is worth holding in your head.
AI capex flows to silicon, power, and cooling — capital-heavy, labor-light. Per BEA capex-to-payroll ratios, a dollar of datacenter spend generates ~5 cents of W2 wages over five years. A dollar of mid-century manufacturing spend generated ~38 cents. Same headline number, one-eighth the wage transmission. Your career doesn’t get to ride the capex line the way your parents’ did.
What to do this week
Audit your portfolio: how much of your forward income depends on wages, how much on equity / ownership? If it’s 95/5, the capex cycle isn’t your friend. Adjust toward equity over the next 12 months — private RSUs, vested ISOs left to grow, or a productized side income (Play 04) that converts your skill into ownership of cashflow.
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◆ Chart of the Week
$420B of capex. 5 cents of wages per dollar.
Wage transmission per $1 of capex
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2026 hyperscaler capex guidance
$420B
MSFT + GOOG + META + AMZN · up from $267B in 2024
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Source: BEA capital intensity and W2 payroll series; hyperscaler 10-K filings via SEC EDGAR. The size of the cycle is real. The wage transmission is not. Plan your career around that mismatch, not the headline.
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◆ The Tape
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$46K
Unlocked by Play 02
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2.6 hrs
Saved per memo, Play 03
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+9.4%
Senior IC YoY openings
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One favour before you go
Reply with one number: 01, 02, 03, 04, or 05 — which play you’d run first this week.
I read every reply. They shape what shows up in Issue 002.
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Go run something. See you next Sunday.
— The Operator
still at McKinsey, still building
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Know an operator who’d like this? Forward it →
© 2026 New Money
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