What does Adam Roozen do?

Adam Roozen builds technology systems and trades his own capital. He is CEO of Isotropic Solutions, which builds governed agent workforces for businesses, enterprises and national institutions. He also runs business automation experiments testing how much can operate without people, and takes a small number of advisory engagements each year.

What is Adam Roozen's background in trading?

Adam has traded his own capital for ten years, and it is his primary income. He started in forex around 2016, added crypto in 2018, and crypto became the main focus from 2021, with equities and index futures alongside it. He trades theses rather than tickers, and has built software around his own research process. He trades only his own capital. He does not manage outside money, is not a financial adviser or fund manager, and publishes no performance figures.

What is Adam Roozen's background in digital technology?

Adam has worked through every consumer technology wave since the mid-nineties. He built transactional websites in high school, before payment processors existed, and had to write his own card encryption. He joined Walmart as a programmer analyst during the early dot-com build-out, ran e-commerce marketing at Sam's Club through the mobile wave, scaled a global commerce agency through the social and cloud waves, worked in tokenized and blockchain systems, and now builds autonomous agent systems.

What is Isotropic Solutions?

Isotropic Solutions was founded by Seran Devaraj, and Adam Roozen joined afterward as CEO. The company builds governed agent workforces: agents do operational work, a person signs off, and every decision keeps its evidence. Autonomy is earned a rung at a time, from drafting, to recommending, to acting under review, to running inside written limits. The second half of the work is preparing businesses to be read and transacted with by other companies' AI systems.

How is Adam different from a traditional technology consultant?

Adam runs the systems he would otherwise be advising about. Two of his companies operate with no employees, his trading runs on software he wrote, and Isotropic Solutions ships agent systems into banks and commodity traders. He has also spent nearly 30 years operating: building early e-commerce at Walmart, running e-commerce marketing for a $700M to $1B channel at Sam's Club, and co-founding a 200-person agency.

What is Adam Roozen's background in e-commerce?

Adam led e-commerce marketing and operations at Sam's Club (Walmart) while the channel grew from $700M to $1B in annual revenue. He then co-founded Echidna and scaled it to more than 200 people, serving blue-chip retailers including Kohl's, Michael Kors, Toys 'r Us, Lowe's, Cracker Barrel, Aveda, Jelly Belly, Wolters Kluwer, Dubai Duty Free, Liverpool in Mexico and Mr. Price in South Africa.

Who does Adam work with?

The work spans four sizes. One person, in the zero-employee companies he runs himself. Owner-operated businesses between $5M and $50M, through W3 Strategic Management Services. Enterprises, such as ETG, a global agricultural commodity trader turning over $8B across 250 business units. And national institutions, including the Central Bank of Oman and Vietnam International Bank.

How do I start working with Adam?

Adam takes a small number of advisory engagements each year, and works directly with whoever is accountable rather than through a team of associates. When an owner-operator needs the cash more than he needs the invoice, he will take revenue share instead of a fee. The best first step is a short note through the contact page describing what you are up against.

The Tool-Shaped Hole

Somewhere inside a lot of organizations right now, a job description is being rewritten because of A.I. Some roles are getting thinner. Some are getting stranger. A few are appearing under titles that would have read like science fiction not that long ago. Everyone seems to feel the ground moving, at least a little.

Let's slow it down and look at how one of these hiring decisions actually gets made, one step at a time. Then we'll take it off hiring completely. This isn't hiring advice, by the way. We're hunting meta.

The hole

Before the specimen, the concept. Here it is:

"A tool-shaped hole is a need described in the shape of a tool, rather than in the shape of the problem."

(Probably not my best one.) A job posting usually points at the easiest thing to describe, which is the tool. The problem is harder to write down, so it gets less ink. If the problem is the thing that hurts, and the tool is whatever currently stops the hurting, then most hiring language – nearly all of it, I'd guess – describes the thing that stops the hurting for now.

The hiring manager

So let's follow one hiring manager through it. Picture Dana running the customer support team at a mid-sized online retailer. Not a real company, not a real Dana – concrete enough to smell, though. Her team answers order questions, drafts replies, checks refund rules, and tries to keep angry people from becoming more angry. Let's just call all of that, plainly, the work.

(a) A.I. starts taking pieces of Dana's work. Drafting, summarizing, checking, counting. Maybe not most of the work. Enough of it that everyone notices.

(b) Dana feels this as a gap on her team, and the gap is hard to look at directly.

(c) So Dana describes the gap using the nearest object to hand, which is the tool. Her posting asks for experience with this season's systems, this year's vocabulary, maybe the exact helpdesk setup her team already uses.

(d) Dana hires someone who matches that description exactly.

(e) Then the tool moves on Dana. It seems like tools always move. The one she hired for gets replaced, absorbed, renamed, folded into some other system with a new login screen.

The tool changed. That's all. And because the hire was matched to the tool – this season's version, with this season's words – the team can look covered while the gap keeps getting work done around the edges. Customers still need the weird exception handled. The posting stays on file. The problem is still there.

What did Dana need, back at step (c)? The problem solved. That might be the whole answer. The tool was just this era's way of solving it, and Dana wrote the era into the requirements.

I don't think Dana is doing anything wrong, tbh. Describing a problem with all the tools taken away is genuinely hard. (I've written the tool-shaped version myself. More than once.) It is WAY easier to write "needs experience with X" than to write "must keep being useful while X dissolves."

Two kinds of hire

So far as I can tell, there are two shapes a hire can take:

(a) One that fits the tool. This is a snapshot of the present. It can look great right away and it ages however the tool ages.

(b) One that fits the problem. This person maybe doesn't know this season's systems yet. What they have is the capacity to keep becoming useful. Tool after tool.

A cleaner way to say (b): the useful question is not whether someone already knows the current system. It is whether they have shown they can become useful again when the system is replaced. I think of it as slope rather than position, but we already have a concept on the table and I don't want to hoard them. The hole is the important part.

And which of the two does the average posting ask for? It looks like (a), at least from where I sit. imo that says more about how hard (b) is to describe than it does about any manager's judgment.

The meta, alone

Alright. Let's get up above it. Take A.I. off the table. Take hiring off the table too. What's left is the concept by itself: a need gets described in the shape of whatever tool is loudest right now, and the description quietly outlives the tool. Where else does that happen?

Farms, maybe. Horses gave way to engines a long while back – I won't pin the decade, it doesn't matter here. A farm that described its need horse-shaped – and plenty probably did – would have struggled badly. A farm that described its need problem-shaped, someone who knows this land and how to work it, could trade the horses for engines and keep going.

School seems to do this too. A family picks a field of study shaped like this season's hot career. The career moves before the studying is done, which I'd expect by now. The thing that might have held value the whole time is less shiny: the habit of picking up a new tool without falling apart.

And then there's the least comfortable place the pattern shows up. You. Me. My own resume is mostly a record of systems I have touched. It says much less about what I did when one of those systems stopped mattering. I can't tell from my own resume which shape it is.

Where I land

The piece I haven't worked out is detection. If the durable thing is a person's slope, how do you see a slope in an hour of conversation? Resumes mostly record positions. Interviews, at least the ones I've been part of, mostly test the present tense. Maybe you ask people what they've had to unlearn lately, and then you watch their face. Maybe that's nonsense.