The Conviction founder takes the field's favorite term and stretches it across business reality — and the stretch mostly works. Incentive misalignment really is the silent killer of AI startups: models that dazzle in demos but don't fit workflows, vendors optimizing for engagement over outcomes, teams pulling in different directions. Our one caveat: the metaphor risks diluting the technical meaning — reward hacking in a model and a sales team chasing the wrong KPI share a structure but not a severity. Still, it's a genuinely useful lens for founders auditing their own stack of incentives. If she's right, the alignment tax isn't just a research bill — it's a line item in every org chart.