Can Startups Be a Team of One?

How far off are we from not needing any employees — ever?

I know this sounds a little out there, but maybe not. We're watching a dramatic shift happen, where more and more Founders are replacing all the people they used to hire with AI.

I don't love it. It's weird. I'm used to working with a team, and that has always been one of the best parts of my job: building startups. But for millions of Founders who are just starting out, who don't have the resources to hire an entire team, being able to do the things it used to take a team to do (without one) is awfully appealing!

This isn't an argument for why hiring people is "bad." It's not.

This is an exploration about how much longer we're going to need to hire anyone at all, and what that means to us as Founders.

Back in the Days of Yore

Back in the "Days of Yore," like 2 years ago, when you needed to build a company, you needed to pay a premium for some folks. If you were the typical tech startup, you had a product person (usually the Founder), a developer who built the app, and a marketer who found some customers.

The reason those 3 people existed is because they all brought skill sets the startup couldn't otherwise access easily. Nearly every "product Founder" has been running around trying to find a developer to build their stuff (for equity) since the dawn of Internet time, because without that person, there would be no product.

Once they paid for that, they had to go find someone that understood marketing to get some actual customers, and so they paid for that. The idea of doing all 3 was nearly impossible for a single person, so building a team was the foundation of building a startup.

Those were simpler times.

The AI Replacement

Then came the AIs. All of a sudden, Claude or Lovable were building your app before you even had a chance to look for a developer. GPT was writing your marketing copy and generating sweet designs for your acquisition campaigns.

They were doing it faster and more efficiently than the team you could possibly access — for hundreds of dollars per month. You could literally hear the air getting sucked out of the startup ecosystem in a bizarre way.

Now, all of a sudden, the people who were absolute necessities to launch became "nice to haves." People became optional, maybe even recommended, but definitely not required.

(As a side note — this is all scary AF. When I write about this stuff, I'm not high-fiving the AIs, but I am making a strong statement about how much things have changed. I'm freaked out too, but this is the world we live in.)

It's About to get Geometrically Worse (or Better)

Now, depending on what side of the fence you're on about this, things are about to get geometrically worse, or better, depending on how you see it. Claude and Lovable have some upper limits right now on how far you can take their code. GPT can create marketing copy and designs, but has very little context for why it's doing anything.

But that's a moment in time. That's a new feature release away from changing. Whatever we're using right now will be looked back on like the "Atari 2600" to a present-day Xbox. If it can't replace people yet, wait a second. It will.

Over the next few years, nearly everything a startup Founder would hire workers to do will have an AI replacement, albeit with varying levels of quality. Customer support, finance, and most operations will have an AI counterpart that's damn good.

In a few years, it won't be a decision to use AI instead of hiring someone. It will be a decision to replace an AI with a human, and that's going to be wildly complicated. Will a person be cheaper (no), more consistent (no), or automatically upgraded every month (nope)?

We're in a position where being a one-person team becomes the true baseline, not just a default starting position.

"Can" vs. "Should"

So the question was this — can startups be a team of one now? Yeah, many can. And in the not-too-distant future, they probably will be.

But should they be a team of one?

We're about to test our very humanity with this question. We're about to strip away the things humans were doing only because AI couldn't do them yet, along with the meaning we attached to those things. How do critical human traits like leadership, communication, critical thought, and imagination survive in an era of automation?

Personally, I believe what makes a startup and a product are lots of voices making micro decisions that shape something beautiful. But maybe I'm old school. Maybe that's how it always was, but not how it always will be.

I think the future as a "team of one" sounds lonely and scary. But that doesn't mean it's not the future.

In Case You Missed It

Many Startups Shut Down a Few Times Before Succeeding Most startups are not overnight successes. In fact, many of them have to shut down (sometimes more than once) to build back up to the success they eventually achieve.

Founders, Time is Your Greatest Asset (podcast) Thinking long-term is a total game-changer. It not only toughens you up, but it also attracts investors and partners who are in it for the long run, boosting your chances of scoring lasting success in the crazy world of startups.

The Goal is NOT to be a Startup Sure, Startups get more opportunities to grow and funding offers to expand. But you can’t stay in this phase forever.