“Tiny Teams” of Two in Start-ups in AI Regime
As artificial intelligence takes on more
and more tasks, tech executives are embracing teams as small as two: one person
plus A.I.
·
Start-ups, especially in Silicon Valley, are increasingly
celebrating small teams that achieve more with fewer employees, rather than
large head counts.
·
The trend is being described as “tiny teams”,
where a few “high-agency” employees use AI tools to produce high output and strong
revenue per worker.
·
Media entrepreneur Dan Shipper has coined the
term “two-slice team” — a model where one person works with AI tools instead
of a large team.
·
The concept is inspired by Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza
rule,” which suggested teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas;
now the idea is that one person plus AI can do the work of a full team.
·
At Shipper’s start-up, individual employees manage entire
AI-based products such as writing tools and file-organization software, something
that previously required large teams and budgets.
·
The approach has not reduced hiring entirely; instead,
it has allowed the company to grow to more than 20 employees because small
teams helped build more products faster.
·
Some tech leaders believe the trend could go even further.
For example, Sam Altman has suggested that a one-person billion-dollar
company may soon be possible.
·
Researchers say small teams and large teams both
have strengths:
o
Small teams are better at generating new ideas.
o
Large teams are better at improving and scaling existing
ideas.
·
A potential risk is that if many small teams rely on
the same AI tools, their work may start to look similar, reducing originality.
·
Overall, the article suggests AI is changing how
companies are structured, pushing firms toward multiple small, highly productive
teams rather than large workforces.
In
many industries, leading a big team is a flex. A large head count implies a large
budget, and suggests that your organization is powerful and making things happen.
But lately, in the world of start-ups, some founders have been bragging about doing
more with fewer people.
Silicon
Valley has embraced “tiny teams,” celebrating high revenue-to-worker ratios and
groups of “high agency” employees, who each get plenty done with artificial intelligence.
A site billing itself as the “tiny teams hall of fame,” a directory of such companies,
has garnered some media attention. Dan Shipper, who runs the media start-up Every,
recently coined a spinoff term on the phenomenon — the “two-slice team,” consisting
of just one person plus A.I. tools.
The
idea borrows from Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule,” his notion
from two decades ago that teams at Amazon should not be so large that they require
more than two pies of pizza. Now, Mr. Shipper argues that only two slices of pizza
are needed. The person can eat them both; the A.I. agent doesn’t get hungry.
“One
person can now do so much more” than in the past, Mr. Shipper said in an interview.
At his start-up, several products — including an A.I. writing tool and an A.I. file
organizer — are each managed by one employee (who can call in for help from colleagues
across the organization as needed). This approach, he argues, enables his small,
early-stage start-up to build various products in a way that “used to only be available
to really big companies with huge budgets.”
It’s
perhaps counterintuitive, he said, but the strategy has allowed him to hire more
people overall, expanding to more than 20 employees this year. Without the A.I.-heavy,
two-slice team approach, he said, “we would be a much smaller company because we
would not have been able to build any of the stuff that has caused our growth.”
Some
business leaders are making extreme predictions about tiny teams. Sam Altman, for
example, the chief executive of OpenAI, has suggested that a one-person company
reaching a billion-dollar valuation may not be far off. Mr. Shipper’s conception,
however, is less stark. He sees firms restructuring into a series of small teams,
each run by one or a few people, ideally without mass job losses.
There
have always been trade-offs between big and small organizations. Though large teams
may struggle with communication and buy-in around common goals, they “excel at solving
problems,” said Dashun Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern. “Small teams come up with problems for them to solve.” In his 2019
research about team sizes in science and technology, he found that small teams tend
to introduce new ideas while bigger ones are good at developing existing ideas.
One format, he said, is not necessarily better than the other.
Even
the smallest team of humans will bring together people with different expertise
and perspectives. But today, Dr. Wang noted, any addition to a one-person team is
likely to be named ChatGPT or Claude. A risk of tiny teams that rely on A.I., he
added, is that “now all of a sudden they look a lot more similar, because they,
in some sense, have collaborated with the same person” (who, of course, is not actually
a person).
Those
new teammates, alas, cannot enjoy pizza. Humans, however, still can and do. Mr.
Shipper’s go-to New York-style order: two slices of margherita, folded and eaten
standing at the counter.