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0 pointsm_ke1y ago0 comments

Yes for sure, but from what I've seen at large companies the bottlenecks are already usually caused by intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and "processes" that take something that would have taken a dev with ownership 1-2 days to do and turns it into months long slogs and rituals.

Having worked at early stage startups and mid sized companies there's already a 10-20x productivity gap between them due to this (even on brand new projects at large companies vs startups, where it's not an issue of legacy code).

As an example I just witnessed a large co hire a consulting company to help them "ideate" on a RAG app that barely worked and required 3 rewrites and ~18 months to make it to POC stage, even though a front end dev had a better working POC that he hacked together in a day and a half.

I've heard way worse horror stories from friends at Google / Meta / Apple.

What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

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gyomu1y ago

> What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

The answer is in the comment you just wrote.

If those tiny startups are successful, they will become the next bloated large companies where things take forever because of "intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and processes", which are categories of things LLMs will never solve because LLMs can't solve problems of human consensus.

If those startups aren't successful, they will run out of money and die.

Big companies take forever to do things because they have lots of paying customers to keep happy, a bunch of people who are ready to sue them at the slightest misstep, thousands of employees with families who want job stability and therefore don't want to be betting the farm every 6 months, etc.

Tiny companies can iterate really fast because they have none of this.

LLMs don't change anything about this fundamental reality.

m_keOP1y ago

As the cost of going from 0 to 1 goes to 0 the incentives flip. You'll have way more small companies that raise little or no money from VCs and have no incentives to juice head count to pump the valuation.

I have a lot of friends who started similar companies recently, who are making millions in revenue with 2-8 people and deliberately plan to never grow head count past around 10 people.

We'll have way more teams like midjourney, early whatsapp / instagram and 37signals.

gyomu1y ago

Can you show us these companies?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsm_ke1y ago0 comments

I've heard way worse horror stories from friends at Google / Meta / Apple.

What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

0 comments

gyomu1y ago

> What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?

The answer is in the comment you just wrote.

If those startups aren't successful, they will run out of money and die.

Tiny companies can iterate really fast because they have none of this.

LLMs don't change anything about this fundamental reality.

m_keOP1y ago

I have a lot of friends who started similar companies recently, who are making millions in revenue with 2-8 people and deliberately plan to never grow head count past around 10 people.

We'll have way more teams like midjourney, early whatsapp / instagram and 37signals.

gyomu1y ago

Can you show us these companies?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse