The $100B Company with 10 People

Cloud eliminated infrastructure costs. AI is eliminating headcount costs. High-agency teams of 5-10 people can now build multi-billion dollar companies with $500K in funding. The metric that matters: revenue per employee. Some teams will hit $100M per person.

Fifteen years ago, building a tech company required buying servers, hiring ops teams, and raising millions before writing a line of code. Cloud computing eliminated all that. Companies like Instagram reached 30 million users with 13 employees.

AI Is the Next Step Change: Just as cloud eliminated infrastructure headcount, AI is eliminating knowledge work headcount. Tasks that required teams of analysts, writers, designers, and engineers can now be done by a single person with the right AI tools.

The Numbers:

• •WhatsApp was acquired for $19B with 55 employees ($345M per employee)
• •Instagram had 13 employees at 30M users
• •We think the next generation will be even more extreme

What This Looks Like: The companies that win will optimize ruthlessly for revenue per employee. They'll:

• •Use AI for everything that doesn't require human judgment
• •Stay small to avoid the politics, meetings, and coordination costs that kill velocity
• •Move faster than any competitor because there's no one to convince, no stakeholders to align
• •Compound their advantages because AI tools get better every month

The Constraint: The bottleneck becomes human taste, judgment, and ambition—not human labor. The right 10 people with the right AI tools can outcompete companies with thousands of employees.

What We're Looking For: Founders who believe they can build a company worth tens of billions with a team that fits in a conference room. Not because they want to stay small—but because staying small is how they'll win.