The Treasury Renaissance: Why Tech Hiring Won’t Return to Normal

Many are wondering when hiring and consulting will return to normal, but the reduced hiring and corporate spending we’re seeing is not just a cyclical downturn that will reverse once the economy picks up.

Traditional treasury functions (cash management, liquidity planning, growth and investing, risk mitigation) broke during 2010-2022. We’re now seeing a paradigm shift in how corporations manage their treasuries. The corporate game is becoming excess cash generation, not growth-at-all-costs. This has long standing implications for roles and responsibilities, hiring, team performance and much more.

In this post, I explain this corporate treasury shift, how it will affect tech and product teams, and what’s important for coaches and managers.

I realize that reading a post about corporate treasury, and investment playbooks may seem foreign to many agile coaches, and managers, but understanding treasuries is crucial for successfully supporting organizations and teams, particularly when we’re at a larger shift.

The Treasury Problem

During 2010-2022, zero interest rates fundamentally broke traditional corporate cash management. Up until then, corporate treasuries largely followed John Malone’s operating manual from his TCI days.

Simplified, Malone’s playbook was to offset taxes by taking out loans to grow through acquisitions of cash flow positive companies. The debt interest reduced taxable income while the acquired assets generated returns that exceeded borrowing costs.

However, the way this played out in tech companies wasn’t disciplined acquisitions but growth by acquiring user bases and investing heavily in product development. This corporate treasury strategy made several critical assumptions: money would always be cheap to borrow, there’s a clear symmetry between internal investment and positive cash flow generated, and user bases become cash flow positive over time.

As people would discover, none of these assumptions were true. Meanwhile, the other financial instruments that treasury departments had relied on for decades also stopped working. Previously “risk-free” government bonds yielded essentially nothing, stocks carried high volatility risk, and bank accounts offered near-zero returns. The classic approach of parking excess cash in safe assets became a guaranteed path to value destruction.

In the wake of this breakdown, a new playbook has emerged that’s reshaping corporate treasuries entirely, and it has direct implications on companies willingness to expand their product portfolios and thus hiring.

The Growth Gambling Response

Because there were no great ways to preserve capital value, capital owners, VCs, and investors poured money into high-growth companies as their own form of treasury management.

Product companies made, to them, seemingly rational choices. If they weren’t cash flow positive, it was because their product needed a few more features, wasn’t robust enough, or needed better user experience. The solution seemed simple: invest a little more to turn positive.

Even companies that were already cash flow positive felt it wasn’t enough. The fear was constant: “Any day now, a competitor could emerge and threaten us if we’re not the dominant player in our field.”

This mindset created a dangerous cycle. Companies would raise money and spend it on aggressive hiring and expansion to stay ahead of potential threats. But this actually made the problem worse – higher operating expenses and reduced organizational performance meant they needed to raise again just to maintain momentum.

Each funding round required showing growth, which created pressure to spend even more aggressively. The very strategy meant to solve their treasury problem was eroding their financial health.

The result was a system where both sides were trapped. VCs couldn’t stop funding growth, or didn’t want to because of sunk cost fallacy, and companies couldn’t stop spending (growth was the only path to the next round). Everyone was responding to the broken treasury environment with increasingly desperate strategies.

This created the massive hiring sprees and “growth at all costs” mentality that defined 2012-2021. But when cheap capital disappeared, the stock market collapsed, and government bonds lost value, the entire house of cards collapsed, revealing that most of this wasn’t sustainable business building – it was desperate treasury management disguised as a growth strategy.

The New Playbook: Bitcoin Treasuries

In the wake of this breakdown, a new approach is emerging that abandons growth gambling. Instead of using operational expansion as treasury management, companies have figured out that they can preserve capital value directly through better treasury assets.

Starting in 2020, companies like MicroStrategy and Tesla began experimenting with holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets. For years, this faced significant hurdles – US accounting rules being the biggest obstacle. But MicroStrategy, Tesla, the Chamber of Digital Commerce, investors, accounting firms, and institutional investors pushed for clearer accounting standards. And from 2025, new FASB rules allow companies to report Bitcoin at fair value, removing a major adoption barrier.

This represents a fundamental evolution of corporate strategy. Where John Malone used debt to finance acquisitions of cash-flowing companies, today’s playbook follows Michael Saylor’s approach: use debt to buy Bitcoin instead of businesses. Same financial engineering principles – interest payments reduce taxable income while the acquired asset potentially appreciates – but without the operational complexity of integrating acquisitions. The counterparty risk is something that companies have become much more sensitive to.

The math is compelling: borrow at low interest rates, use the funds to buy Bitcoin, and let the interest payments reduce your taxable earnings while betting that Bitcoin appreciation exceeds your borrowing costs. You get tax efficiency without the management headaches, integration risks, or operational bloat that comes with traditional M&A.

To be clear: most companies adopting this strategy aren’t trying to build new monetary systems or make philosophical statements. They’re solving a practical treasury problem – how to reduce taxes, how to preserve capital value, and where to park corporate cash. Bitcoin is emerging as the most effective solution in the current environment. This is financial optimization, not monetary revolution which on a side note has created a divide within the Bitcoin community.

Lyn Alden (a macro economist) goes into details about this in her blogpost “The Rise of Bitcoin Stocks and Bonds”. It’s a great read if you’re looking to better understand the mechanics.

Bitcoin on the Balance Sheet

When Figma filed to go public in the US, they disclosed $100 million worth of Bitcoin in ETFs and real Bitcoin. This came as a surprise to many. Just a few years back, few companies were holding Bitcoin, but more and more companies are making the transition to being a Bitcoin treasury.

We’ve now entered a period where companies are racing to acquire as many Bitcoin as possible given its limited supply. A substantial amount has been invested so far into acquiring Bitcoin since 2024 ($45+ billion) with mostly borrowed capital. And this rate will continue to increase.

This means $45+ billion never made it to product and tech companies as investments. Money is returning, it’s just not returning to tech and product companies. But it’s important to point out that even if the playbook hadn’t been updated, only a part of this would have found its way to tech and product. We’re returning to a “new” normal where IT is not over valued and hyped.

A common concern and misconception is that companies are acting erratically here, and that they’re at risk because nations or regions could issue bans. But with EUs MICA, and the updated FASB, regulatory hurdles are mostly gone. And it’s not just public and private companies investing, it’s governments, pension funds, and institutions too. Bitcoin has in a very short period of time now become so entangled in the global economy that it’s unlikely that we’ll see it become banned or blocked because of the huge financial implications it would have on voters.

You can see the full list of companies making this transition here: BitcoinTreasuries.NET.  This broad adoption signals we’re past an experimental phase and that we’re crossing the chasm, or moving towards Bitcoin treasuries being a mainstream corporate treasury practice.

Generating Excess Cash 

But to execute this Bitcoin treasury strategy, companies need excess cash flow. They need either surplus cash to invest directly, or strong enough cash flows to support the debt required for larger Bitcoin accumulation. The greater a company’s excess cash flow is, the more Bitcoin they can accumulate – making operational efficiency and margin optimization critical to the strategy.

This fundamentally changes corporate priorities. Instead of “grow at all costs” the focus has or will become “generate cash at all costs.”

For startups, instead of discussing usability, and customer delighters, or product market fit, we will probably see more discussions around positive cash flow lead times. 

For established companies, it means aggressive cost optimization – reducing headcount, automating processes, and maintaining the smallest effective organization possible. While many think we’re getting out of it, cost optimizations are just beginning and it’s not going to slow down. Many organizations have 15 years of free capital that’s bloated products, architecture, and their organizations. It takes time to clean that up.

The math is straightforward: a company generating $10M in annual excess cash flow can either invest that directly in Bitcoin or use it to service debt that allows them to buy $50M+ in Bitcoin (depending on interest rates). But a company burning $10M annually has zero capacity for this strategy. Cash flow generation becomes the new competitive moat.

This creates a powerful incentive structure where operational excellence directly translates to treasury advantage. Companies that can generate more cash per employee, reduce coordination costs, and maintain lean operations will accumulate more Bitcoin, creating a compounding advantage over competitors still playing the old growth game.

This is going to create demand for high talent consulting within operational efficiency. Agile coaches might read this thinking that scrum, kanban, or that lean is going to become important, but that’s erroneous. The days of blind installation of agile methodologies are (finally) behind us. Future demand will be for consultants that can help companies reduce costs and these optimizations won’t come from the people we today consider coaches. 

As an example, many experienced cloud engineers offer cost cutting optimization consulting with standard, achievable, promises to reduce AWS costs 30%. For a large, bloated, company, that’s a substantial amount of savings and increased liquidity.

This is why hiring won’t return to the old normal, the underlying financial logic that drove aggressive hiring has fundamentally changed. And what type of consulting that will be hired will be in support of operational excellence.

Next, I’m going to go through how LLMs will either make or break companies on this journey, and how cash flow is the game of the next decade.

Leveraging LLMs to Keep Operational Costs Low

(A clone version of the wardley map can be found here)

Now that we’ve established how corporate treasuries broke down after 2010 and why companies are shifting toward Bitcoin accumulation instead of operational expansion, let’s examine how LLMs fit into this strategy. 

In principle, technology is deflationary in nature, and reduces production or creation costs. Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure demonstrated this principle: they eliminated the need for large infrastructure teams by making previously complex capabilities simple and accessible. LLMs represent the next leap in this progression, making it possible for companies to tackle problems that once required specialized expertise or large teams, or that previously was outside their economic reach.

This comes at the perfect time. Companies need to generate maximum excess cash flow to support their Bitcoin treasury strategies, which means operating as efficiently as possible with minimal headcount. And most people don’t realize just how expensive large teams and organizations actually are – not just in salaries, but in coordination costs, dependencies, and organizational inefficiency.

I developed Napkin-ops.com to help companies visualize these hidden costs, and make operational improvements. Below is an example of a fairly standard organization with sixty developers across nine teams. Their monthly inefficiency overspend alone could fund a new team – or buy Bitcoin.

LLMs enable companies to maintain productivity with dramatically smaller teams, eliminating much of this waste. The productivity gains are substantial, but they only materialize with disciplined implementation. Companies that master both Bitcoin treasury management and disciplined AI usage can redirect these massive coordination cost savings toward asset accumulation, creating a compounding advantage over competitors still playing the old growth game. But I can’t stress enough how disciplined usage is key. Without disciplined usage, operational costs will increase and jeopardize the entire company’s future and it’s likely that we’ll see many companies go out of business because of reckless usage of AI.

Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer) goes into detail about the current state of LLM engineering in a recent deepdive of his.

Why Hiring Won’t Return To Pre-Covid Levels

This combination of Bitcoin treasury strategies and AI-driven operational efficiency fundamentally changes the hiring equation. Companies no longer need to scale headcount aggressively to preserve capital value – they can achieve that goal directly through better treasury management while operating with smaller, more productive teams.

The old logic was: “We can’t preserve value through safe assets, so we must grow rapidly through hiring and expansion to bet on our own potential.” The new logic is: “We can preserve value directly through Bitcoin while using AI to maintain productivity with fewer people.” This removes the primary driver behind the massive hiring sprees of 2012-2021.

For investors, the calculus has shifted too. Why fund a company that needs 200 employees to reach profitability when you could invest in one that reaches the same goal with 20 employees? Or more fundamentally, why fund any company when Bitcoin itself might deliver better returns with zero operational complexity? This forces startups to prove they can generate returns that significantly exceed Bitcoin’s ~30% annual appreciation rate – a much higher bar than previous VC expectations.

The result is a permanent shift toward lean, profitable operations rather than growth-at-all-costs hiring. Companies that master this new playbook – operational efficiency, disciplined AI usage, and cash flow optimization – will dominate the next decade without needing to return to the hiring patterns of the past.

What About People Who’ve Already Lost Their Jobs?

People who’ve been laid off or can’t find work will take several different paths: many will transition to other industries or trades, some will choose early retirement, and over time there will be a natural adjustment and fewer people will enter the tech industry.

But over time, as the cost of production drops, we’ll likely see many more new small companies started. However, few will be VC backed. Money is always looking for better places to be invested, but capital owners have changed their playbook.

This leads us to hyper-growth hiring. We’re unlikely to see it broadly across all fields again. There will still be hyper-expansion in a few select fields such as LLM companies, but that’s about it for now. Other areas will of course continue to get investments when the fundamentals are right, but we won’t see any Juiceros any time soon ($120 million in funding).

What we’ll see are smaller companies and teams trying to reach profitability faster, and if they generate excess cash flow they might be relevant for M&A given that it’s a way to expand cash flow which allows companies to acquire more Bitcoin. 

What To Do Now

The shift from growth-at-all-costs to efficient cash generation is already underway. For managers and coaches, this means that working with teams must go beyond agile processes and team dynamics, and financial impact can no longer be ignored.

Whether you’re at a tech startup feeling the pressure now or at an enterprise that won’t face this for several years, the fundamentals will remain the same: companies that master lean operations, disciplined AI usage, and cash flow optimization will dominate the next decade.

Five actions you can take, whether you’re a manager or coach:

1. Understand how your teams contribute to revenue or margins, and where the greatest opportunities are.
2. Facilitate, learn, coach disciplined AI usage to reduce operational costs long-term.
3. Decide on one aspect of running a business and deep dive into that. Don’t learn the popular processes sold by management firms, but aim to deeply understand the underlying theories, and the math behind them. It doesn’t matter if you learn finance, marketing, or engineering, but really learn how to operate that aspect of the business over a period of years to position yourself as someone increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
4. Build strategic understanding of what problems to focus on, and learn Wardley Mapping.
5. Learn basic treasury functions.

Thank you Christopher Daniel for reviewing my work, and helping with the Wardley Map.