The Discipline of the Money in the AI Era. Price the work. Build the margin. Own the ledger.
Enter your email and the PDF opens. One step.
Software sold copies at near-zero marginal cost. This era sells work, and work has a cost of goods: inference, paid per token, on a price curve the firm does not control. Gross margin becomes a design outcome, and the seat breaks from both ends.
The capital to produce intelligence is committed years ahead on a physical clock, against demand that arrives in quarters. The P&L you read is not the capital you owe, so the book builds instruments to reconcile the two: the hurdle, the acid test, the joints.
Tokens, environment compute and attention, divided by outcomes a referee accepted. Budget in tokens per accepted outcome, never in price tables.
Capex buys an asset that produces revenue for five to thirty years; revenue is a twelve-month flow. Three comparisons work instead.
The hurdle is a division on the capital deployed. The acid test scores six gauges on one shared rail so a composite cannot average the finding away.
Gennaro Cuofano — creator of The Business Engineer & FourWeekMBA, read by 94,000+ founders, operators, and investors. Text and plates are original work. Where the field’s practice runs ahead of published proof, the book states the pattern as method, with the observation that would retire it.
104 pages · 41 plates · 35 chapters. Free — enter your email and it opens.
Want the whole library?
This book is one volume of The Business Engineer Library. Right now membership is half price.
See The Business Engineer → Join at 50% off →