Can a Tiny Team Build a Billion-dollar AI Company?

Ben Horowitz tells Andrew Chen that a very small team can reach a giant audience and a ton of money, and he is sure about that part. Instagram had 13 people and sold for a billion dollars. He thinks Instagram would probably have ended up with a large staff even if Meta had not bought it, and Meta now has a ridiculous number of employees. Ray Kurzweil predicted that everybody would be a solo entrepreneur, and that outcome could still arrive.

The harder question is whether the tiny team can sustain the lead or gets taken out by someone doing more things. People always want more, and the standard keeps rising. John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1970 that once people had shelter, food, and clothes they would work no more than 15 hours a week. The forecast was wrong. Cars, a television in every room, smartphones, and air conditioning showed up, and none of that existed when he wrote it. Needs tend to expand, so meeting them can still mean a bigger company. Software that is easy to write also gets cloned, the way fast fashion gets copied.