#13: 2028 - 10 Person, Billion Dollar Companies
AI will play a transformative role in reducing the cost and time required to launch and scale a startup. In just a few short years, companies will be built much more efficiently and require far less capital.
No need to raise $30M to hire 30 engineers and 20 sales people to build and bring a product to market.
A team of less than 5, who are highly-skilled in leveraging automation in an iterated fashion, will be able to achieve the same thing. And generate profits without taking a dime in investment capital.
At a tactical level, the evolution of the sophistication of AI will bring about the following changes:
Automation - Companies will be able to automate significantly more tasks and processes, enabling startups to operate with leaner teams and lower overhead costs. Streamlining repetitive tasks will improve operational efficiency and optimize resource allocation.
Data-Driven Insights - AI will enhance the speed and accuracy of decision-making by analyzing vast amounts of data and generating insights. This empowers startups to make more informed strategic choices, and reducing the likelihood of costly mistakes. No more “move fast and break things” - fewer experiments are required to find product-market fit and scale.
Engineering - On the technical side, AI can facilitate rapid iteration on product development. Today engineers build on top of open source software or develop from scratch. Tomorrow engineers will simply plug prompts into a ChatGPT-like system that will spit out the required code in seconds.
We’ve heard rumblings that the Engineering, Legal and Consulting fields will be automated away because of the technology that AI empowers. But if a couple of folks can build something, find market-value and generate revenue/profit with significantly fewer resources, couldn’t a case be made for the VC industry to go extinct? Especially at the Series A level?
Feel free to shoot me your thoughts.