Markie Wagner, backed by Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Genius Ventures, and OpenAI, is making her first public argument since her 2023 essay 'Choose Good Quests': tokenmaxxing is broken. Her thesis is direct. Fortune 500 CEOs committed to massive token spend budgets and cannot account for what they received. Wagner was saying this before it became consensus.
The piece introduces the frame of Return on Tokens, ROT, as the metric that exposes the gap between AI investment and AI output. This is not a soft critique of enterprise AI adoption. It is a structural argument about how companies are measuring the wrong thing, from someone who works directly with the executives making those budget decisions.
Wagner has been quiet since 'Good Quests' and this is her first written piece since. The argument matters not just for its conclusion but for the reasoning she builds to get there. Read it to understand how a founder with this specific investor lineup and this specific access to C-suite conversations is framing the next phase of enterprise AI.
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