Everything is downstream of ambition

and why I don't buy the one person billion dollar company

I met a star engineer in New York last week. Considering leaving his job to start something in a new domain where he has no unfair advantages. I spent 45 minutes brainstorming ideas with him, but mostly pushing to make sure he wasn’t running away from something and founding a company for the sake of founding a company.

He said he’s going to think about it, same as he has for the last six months, which is why he hasn’t (smartly) quit his job.

I have this conversation all the time now. Everyone wants to start a company, same way everyone wanted to be a PM seven years ago. It looks shiny but it’s SO hard.

And you see a lot of news around how someone will build the one person billion dollar company, or how you never need venture capital and can bootstrap your way there. If that happens, great. I don’t buy it.

And sure sure, the commodity seller of money is pumping his bags. Guilty. But you have no idea how many conversations I have where I tell founders not to raise, especially when they don’t have a long term ambition or a 10 year mission or frankly any shot at a barbell outcome.

What bugs me about the one person company is the order. How many people you need used to be something you figured out later, after the mission and the roadmap. Now it’s the first thing people decide, and the ambition gets sized to fit.

And that’s the thing. Everything is downstream of your ambition. If your ambition is very large you’ll hire people. You’ll acquire companies. You’ll use capital as a weapon and not as a destiny. You’ll use it to accelerate your roadmap. You’ll push hard even with constraints. You won’t let capital be the limiter of your growth.

Even the bootstrapped companies everyone points to work this way. Turbopuffer hit $100M in revenue nineteen months in without raising a dollar of primary capital, the only money that changed hands was a small secondary so the team could take some liquidity off the table. Yet they’re a couple dozen people and hiring more. They didn’t decide to stay small, their ambition just outran their need for anyone else’s money. Meanwhile the labs building these agents are hiring thousands of people and raising tens of billions of dollars, which tells you something about whether the people closest to agents think hiring is over.

Also a word on keeping a high bar, because none of this means you lower it. Each person will matter even more when they’re managing a fleet of agents that can wreak havoc on your company. Hiring has never been more important. But hiring no one, I don’t buy it.

Might be famous last words. But, no founder with real ambition has ever asked me if the one person company is possible. They ask how to hire faster, or they want to buy the competitor that’s annoying them. Maybe the people asking about staying solo haven’t figured out what they want yet.

The engineer in New York doesn’t have the ambition yet, so he hasn’t quit. If he finds it, he won’t need six months to decide. He’ll be gone in a week and I hope I’ll be the first person he tells.