In partnership with
THE LEVERAGE BRIEF
Weekly intelligence for Portfolio Executives closing the AI Wage Gap.
In today’s edition:
The Gap Report – the highly personal WHY of why I write the Leverage Brief
The Talent Feed – curated AI testing and SME roles you can truly learn AI - and earn real money - from.
The Board Brief – non‑exec and fractional board seats worth your attention.
The Portfolio Stack Spotlight – one spectacular tool and deal that lets you get enterprise-level tools at insane discounts.
The OS Corner – how to build your own Portfolio Executive OS with peers - only 7 spots left.
Please take 3-5 min to tell me what would make this newsletter super valuable for you
1. The Gap Report
From School Kitchen to Portfolio Executive: Why I’m Writing The Leverage Brief
Not so long ago, I was working in a school kitchen in Israel.
Not as a “fun side project” or a mindfulness retreat. As in: plastic gloves, industrial ovens, burning my fingers on trays, chopping vegetables at 7 a.m. so kids could eat lunch — while people on LinkedIn still assumed I was some kind of fancy HR exec in New York.
On paper, I’d done “everything right.” Law school. Corporate. Startups. Three‑time CHRO. Consultant to PE‑backed companies. AI training work for the biggest labs. Articles in big‑name magazines. The kind of LinkedIn that gets you invited to panels, not to wash dishes.
And then life did what life does.
Wrong roles. Wrong people. Immigration. Bureaucracy. Family. Health. Burnout. Bridges burned and bridges walked away from. One day you’re the guy rolling out transformation programs; the next you’re staring at your bank account and realizing the market does not care about your story at all. It cares whether you can pay rent and put food in front of your kids.
So I did the most un‑LinkedIn thing I could think of: I took the kitchen job.
It was humbling and humiliating — and clarifying as hell.
Because once you’re in a hot kitchen doing manual work after years of “knowledge work,” a few things become impossible to unsee:
Your fancy titles never guaranteed you anything.
The company “family” was a tagline, not a safety net.
The market will happily throw out your skills and your story the second a spreadsheet says you’re inconvenient.
I had spent years helping companies “optimize” people as if they were line items, then suddenly I was the line item with no leverage. At the exact same time, AI budgets were exploding. Companies were overpaying for unproven AI tools and consultants while quietly underpaying or cutting the humans expected to carry the fallout.
That’s the AI wage gap in real life. Not a chart. A guy with a law degree and a CHRO resume prepping schnitzel at 7 a.m.
The kitchen was my bottom and my reset.
From there, I started rebuilding my life as a portfolio, not a position:
Fundraising and operations for a yeshiva that actually needed every shekel raised.
Advisory and consulting work across time zones for CEOs, founders, and PE‑backed companies trying to figure out AI, org design, and talent without blowing themselves up.
AI training and evaluation work for the labs building the tools everyone is now scrambling to understand.
Venture scouting and due diligence, because I’ve seen enough bad leadership to recognize when something real is hiding under the pitch deck.
Writing — about work, faith, family, and the absurd ways people with power talk about “people” when things get hard.
None of this was clean or linear. It was messy, exhausting, and at times downright depressing. But it did one crucial thing:
It made it obvious that the only executives who are actually safe in an AI economy are the ones who own their leverage across multiple arenas — not the ones who cling the hardest to a single job.
A Portfolio Executive, in my language, is not a buzzword. It’s someone who:
Has more than one way to make money.
Has relationships that are stronger than any one org chart.
Has systems and an operating rhythm that let them juggle all of the above without losing their mind or their family.
Can quickly adapt, build actual, working (basically professional) AI tools, workflows and agents - without ever learning how to code
The Leverage Brief exists because I don’t want you to have to go through the school‑kitchen chapter to get that clarity.
I want you to see what I wish I’d seen years earlier:
That AI is not a trend to “stay on top of”; it’s a force that will quietly compress your pay and options unless you build leverage outside your job description. That’s if it’s not already forced you out of your corporate job.
AI is an insane field leveler, force multiplier the likes of which have never been seen, even for non-coders, for neurodiverse folks (including ADHD peeps like myself) for those “too old to learn new tricks.”
That corporate loyalty has a very specific price and a very short memory.
That your career is a portfolio whether you admit it or not — the only question is whether you design it on purpose.
That a few side gigs or projects is NOT the same as a true Portfolio Executive OS - exactly what I’m building here.
Each week here, I’m going to give you one honest look at how this stuff is actually playing out, plus a few specific ways to add income, relationships, or systems to your portfolio.
No guru voice. No “10x your life in 7 days” bullshit. Just one guy who has been the CHRO, the consultant, the startup guy, the fundraiser, the AI labeler, the kitchen worker — and who is now building a portfolio that doesn’t depend on any one person’s mood or any one company’s quarter.
If your job disappeared 90 days from now, what would still be standing?
What - or who - would still be paying you?
Who would still be calling you?
What systems would you still have to lean on?
Hit reply and tell me, in one or two sentences, which of your three levers is weakest right now: money streams, relationships, or systems. That’s where I’ll point more of this newsletter for you.
2. The Portfolio Stack Spotlight
This week’s leverage play: Airtable credits via Secret (The Portfolio Stack)
Airtable is a database‑meets‑spreadsheet workspace that lets you run everything from pipeline tracking to content calendars to lightweight CRMs and project dashboards in one flexible system. Through Secret, you can unlock $1,000 in Airtable credits for one year (or $500 in credits if you’re an agency/service company), and those credits can even be applied to existing paying accounts. In practice, for most small teams, that’s close to a year of Airtable’s Team plan effectively covered.
This week’s Portfolio Stack spotlight is Airtable via Secret because it’s one of the easiest ways for a Portfolio Executive to standardize how you see your portfolio across clients, boards, deals, and writing projects — while letting Secret pick up the bill. If you’re running 3–5 mandates at once, you can stand up a simple “Portfolio Executive cockpit” in Airtable (clients, roles, pipeline, experiments) and then clone it across every engagement, knowing you’ve already got up to $1,000 in credits subsidizing that infrastructure. It’s a small setup cost for a huge upgrade in visibility and control.
👉 Explore this and other deals in The Portfolio Stack marketplace →https://the-portfolio-stack.joinsecret.com/
3. The Board Brief
Hand‑picked board and NED roles for Portfolio Executives |
If you want true leverage on your time and expertise, you eventually need seats where you’re deciding, not just doing. Each week I’ll bring 2–3 roles that are worth a serious look. |
I don’t get paid by VirtualNonExecs for featuring these. I feature them because board seats are one of the fastest ways to change both your economics and your identity as you move into a portfolio career. |
4. The Talent Feed (Refer + Mercor + micro1)
Where the AI‑first economy is actually hiring |
Most “AI jobs” lists are noise. I’ll filter down to roles and platforms where there’s real signal — and where you can earn when you connect the right people. |
This week’s feed: |
Join Meridial by Invisible Technologies
MERCOR - open projects
use my referral link to apply to relevant AI training roles → |
LEARN MORE AND APPLY ON MICRO1 → |
If you are a sharp engineers, PM, data scientist or operator in the AI ecosystem (or want to become one), these roles pay top dollar from end clients like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Coursera and others. |
This is how I got my AI training experience in this space over the last year or two. It really works - and the money is quite decent, too. |
Building your Portfolio Executive OS (only 7 spots left)
The newsletter is the intel. But leverage really compounds when you build a system and a peer board around it.
I’m opening an initial Portfolio Executive OS cohort with ForwardShare — a small group of mid‑career and senior HR people (CHROs, VPs of HR) who want to:
Learn how to build (REAL, WORKING) AI workflows and agents
Join a community of fellow CHROs and VPs of HR building real working AI tools, workflows and agents — and changing how they work and add value by 10x
Productize their expertise.
Build the systems and rituals that keep a multi‑stream career sane.
We’re capping the first cohort at a tight group, and only 7 places remain.
Drop us your info (link below) and we’ll be in touch.
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And in case you missed it last week, the genesis of this work is here…
6. The AI Wage Gap Report
There’s a number most executives feel but rarely say out loud. |
Over the last few years, real executive compensation has quietly sagged while AI budgets, vendor spend, and “transformation” line items have exploded. The return on intelligence is going to software and shareholders far faster than it’s going to the people actually building, selling, and leading. That gap between what AI is worth on paper and what humans are paid in practice is the AI wage gap. |
If you’re mid‑career or later, you’ve already felt it: more scope, more complexity, more AI noise, but a comp curve that looks suspiciously flat. You’re asked to “own AI” without a clear mandate, career path, or upside. The story gets framed as “learn AI or be left behind,” but almost nobody hands you a serious playbook for turning AI into leverage instead of liability. |
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