The one person billion dollar company: A possible future of business
https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-one-person-billion-dollar-company
Source: https://summation.net/2020/02/11/the-new-status-game-for-companies-fewer-employees/
Auren 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 on Twitter: “The most important business skill in the next hundred years is the ability to select and manage vendors. This is in contrast to the most important business skill from the last 100 years: the ability to recruit, manage, retain, and grow talent.” / Twitter
Auren goes on to say correctly: “In the future, those who achieve the greatest results with the least number of employees will be admired above all others; the key statistic to look at is the go-forward net revenues per employee because it best encompasses the company’s leverage. What matters is each employee’s productivity and how the business itself can scale?
“If you start stripping out everything that is not unique to your company, you’re left with just a few people who make the unique parts of the company. And then add a few people who need to explain its unique benefits to the market. Imagine your 100 person company going to 6 people. Imagine your 1000 person company going to 20. How much faster could you move?”
The key question is why haven’t companies adopted this mindset 25 or 50 years ago and how does one start to outsource non-essential tasks? Primarily, corporations of yesteryear were full-stack – they rarely used vendors and instead opted for adding many heads into the fold, creating a hierarchy and thus a stringent bureaucracy. This is changing: today, vendor selection is becoming a rare and prized skill as it frees up time and money that businesses can invest in higher ROI activities like R&D.”
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058821822867202048/
The culture within the AI startup market is “AI First” where the first instinct is to use Autonomous AI agents as the first method to get a job done. Automate all the things. Fully remote. Here are the key duties for each of the three roles: CEO: -Vision, strategy, drive growth -Lead public-facing marketing -Also be involved in engineering, hands on coding Will occasionally represent the company in public, but most of the digital marketing and sales functions will be handled by AI agents, which may replicate their likeness.
Product Leader: Will work closely with AI agents to accomplish: -Collaborate with customers & team to construct roadmap -Drive development and delivery or product -Refine and iterate
Operation Leader: -Manage marketing and sales automation, finance, supply chain, and legal functions. -Responsible for company-wide AI agents and generate single source of reporting. -Ensure smooth operations across all functional areas of the company.
SUMMARY -We expect to see this 3-person team form by end now by end of year, with it hitting stride in 3-5 years. -This is just the start of the journey, we expect to see fully-autonomous companies that may not even have humans at the helm.”