Success doesn't need 3,000 employees
Let’s start here, you don't need a massive team to build something the market genuinely wants, and you don't need a headcount of 3,000 and a trillion-dollar balance sheet to call it a win.
Success can just as easily look like a portfolio of ten companies, or even five. Profitable enough to hand investors real returns, and lean enough to give the founders and their 8-to-15-person teams an actual life outside the business.
Think of a team like early Instagram. When Facebook, now meta bought them in 2012 for around a billion dollars, Instagram was running with roughly 13 people on staff. Thirteen. And it was already serving something like 30 million users at that point, a number that would go on to grow into the billions over the following years.
Thirteen people were shipping a product that tens of millions of people opened every single day. No army of middle managers, no floor of meeting rooms, just a small team that knew exactly what they were building and moved on it.
That’s the whole case for staying small, the size of your team says nothing about the size of the dent you can put in the world.
This is the mindset behind what we're building at Foundry One Group, do more with less.
Smaller, faster, more agile teams. Less capital burned for the sake of looking big. More return for every dollar in, and more momentum to actually move.
Bigger isn't faster, it just looks more impressive
A bigger team doesn’t automatically mean you move faster. If anything, it’s the opposite. Running a company of 3,000 people is like steering an oil tanker: it takes a hundred small steps just to get it moving in a straight line, and when the market shifts and you need to turn (pivot the product, change direction, kill a bad bet) that tanker takes forever to respond.
By the time it turns, the moment that mattered has usually passed.You don’t have to take my word for it, the graveyard of “too big to turn” is full of household names.
Kodak’s own engineers invented the digital camera in 1975. They had a two decade head start on the entire industry, and they still managed to file for bankruptcy in 2012, because the organization was too big and too invested in film to seriously chase what it had already built.
Blockbuster had the exact same shot. In 2000, a scrappy little DVD-by-mail startup called Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars. Blockbuster’s leadership, sitting on thousands of stores and billions in revenue, laughed them out of the room.
Ten years later, we all know how that story went. Now Netflix is worth more than most countries’ GDP. That’s not a talent problem, both companies were full of smart people. It’s a mass problem: tankers don’t turn on a dime no matter how good the crew is.
Why I stayed solo, and why you don’t have to be the CEO
I’ve stayed a solo founder on purpose. I believe a business should be able to stand on its own two feet, self-sustaining, not permanently propped up by whoever happened to start it.
That’s exactly why I structure things this way at the studio.
Every venture we build has to be able to run as a real business entity, not a side project that quietly falls apart the moment I stop checking in on it daily.
I’m building a portfolio, not a single company, and there’s no version of that where I’m the one showing up to run day-to-day operations for all of them at once.
Which brings me to the part people usually push back on: you can hire a CEO to run your own company. You don’t have to be it.
The traditional wisdom is, If you founded the thing, you have to run the thing, because only you carry the vision and only you have the passion to take it to the next level. I think that’s mostly a load of bullshit.
Most of the time it isn’t vision talking, it’s control. It’s a founder who can’t let go of the wheel even when they know, somewhere underneath the ego, that the next person would run the business better than they ever could.
And here’s the twist most founders don’t want to hear, if you insist on being CEO yourself, you’re not some untouchable visionary floating above the org chart. You’re just another employee, one whose job happens to be running the company well. Nothing more sacred than that.
Google is the case study people forget. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the thing, but in 2001 they brought in Eric Schmidt to actually run it while they focused on product and technology. Page didn’t take the CEO title back for another decade, once Google had scaled into something enormous. The founders didn’t disappear, they just stopped pretending that founding something and operating it at scale are the same skill.
If I’m honest, staying solo and handing off the CEO seat when it makes sense isn’t really about org charts. It’s the same reason I walked away from the unicorn chase in the first place: the version of success where I have to personally run every piece of every company forever is just the corporate ladder wearing a hoodie.
I didn’t leave one cage to build myself a nicer one. I want the businesses to work, and I want my life to still be mine while they do.
I’m sure some of you reading this know exactly what I mean, still stuck in the very thing you thought you’d already left behind.
If a unicorn shows up anyway
If something we build at Foundry One genuinely turns into a unicorn, that’s an incredible opportunity, and we’d take it seriously.
The chance to run an organization with real potential to do good in the world at scale isn’t something to be precious about.
But here’s the distinction that actually matters to me, “we don’t go looking for unicorns”. We go looking for problems worth solving and businesses worth building, and we let the size take care of itself. A unicorn isn’t a goal in our world, it’s a possible outcome.
Those are two very different starting points. One has you chasing a valuation and bending the problem to fit it.
The other has you finding a real problem and business, falling in love with the problem and building whatever size of business actually solves it well, whether that’s a five-person team that quietly makes someone’s week easier in a niche field or something that eventually needs a few thousand people to run properly.
And if it’s the second one, we’re not scrambling to figure out how. We are building systems as a studio specifically so we can scale a venture when a venture earns it, we design for that from day one, the infrastructure, the way we structure the cap table, the way we hire, all of it can flex up if the business genuinely demands it.
So this isn’t me pretending scale is beneath us. It’s me refusing to let scale be the whole point we exist.
Even then, I’d handle it my way, find the best person for the job and hand them the wheel. Because for me, this was never about proving I could run the biggest company in the room.
It was about building something genuinely good, solving something real, living a life I actually want, and proving the small way works too, right up until the day a problem is big enough that it doesn’t.
If any of that resonates, if you’re quietly tired of hearing that bigger is always better, come build alongside me.
I write about what I’m actually learning as I go, the wins, the wrong turns, and everything in between while building ventures this way.
If you’re in the venture space and you’re a little restless with how things are “supposed” to be done, I’d genuinely like to know you. Subscribe to the newsletter, and let’s connect.