I’m confident we’ll see many <10 person $1B+ companies

True depending on what type of company, the business model, etc. I feel like it's easy to fall into the trap of over-romanticizing growth hacks, lean startup models, & the whole "hustle as one-man team" culture, failing to understand why scaling sometimes means hiring for depth, not breadth of expertise.

I don't buy it. Not until the robots replace workers anyway! A billion-dollar company requires a huge support team, not to mention lots of lawyers, developers, and QA. Then there's marketing, data, and on and on.

I'm not saying businesses need to be as bloated as they are. They don't. But I have a difficult time believing that a <10 person company can hit a billion any time soon.

And that's not a bad thing, btw. The beauty of a small team is you don't have to make a billion. More money is not necessarily better.

In Philip K. Dick Blade Runner (electric sheep) there is a fake religion named "Mercerism". A character talks about it and claims that it's all about "bistouille". I need to find the English translation of this one, but it's basically every little things that exists but serve no real purpose.
Funnily enough, it has become my way to fight procrastination: I don't let "bistouille" spread around and quickly handle missing bills in my accounting, mandatory survey answers (yes this crap exists if you ask for some tax cuts in France) and so on.
They are low value time sinks that are extremely hard to avoid.

In my opinion what prevents such companies to happen is bistouille. Because you need accounting, law, consumer service and all those supports that handle the "bistouille" for you. And you cannot easily eliminate that, because it's not always actually meaningless: you have to pay taxes because you live in a society, you have to hire developers because bugs exists.
The world is complex and even simple solutions are bound to this complexity.

absolutely crazy to see that people are still hiring dozens of people for work that could be done by a few...

Big companies take weeks to make decisions while small companies with a few people can change on a dime, for better or for worse. The underrated person in this hypothetical small group is, unsurprisingly, the marketing guy/girl who knows how to position a product which under the hood probably isn't ready for the $1B limelight.

I am all in favor of the rise of bootstrappers. I have been creating tools and content to enable that for one year now...

With fewer than 10 people, it will be way more difficult to provide the kinds of checks and balances that a billion dollar company needs. Seems to me that a company that small, with that much power, needs more eyes on the inside than it would have.

A nice dream, but the reality is unforgiving. Many companies hire preventively so their competitors will not hire the same talent, hence bloat.

I agree things think this economic downturn will speed things up:

Less funding will lead to less opportunity to rely on money to scale.

Thus software companies will rely on 2 other levers: a) people b) technology

People also won't be available because you need $$$ to pay them. So we'll be "forced" to use technology to scale.

So this totally makes sense.

I like this prediction! I worked at small studios and not only does it feels more "alive", but also the communication is tighter between members. I'm just kind of afraid these big corporations

We've basically built a better version of Hotjar as a 2 person team. We're trying to see if we can stay this size but it does get pretty tough trying to cover product/design, development/infra, customer support, sales, marketing, growth etc.

What would you say is the ideal 10 person team @MichaelKi?

Makes sense to me. A few good coders, or even just one, can do the work of a dozen. And while it may make sense for them to specialize on certain areas of the product, that's in an enterprise enviroments. Startsups and indie projects don't need to wait for a full team of devs to get their product going. They need to be shipping quick and getting the product out fast.