Here is why I predict that companies moving forward who win...

(and want to get acquired by PE or want to exit into some glorious sunset)

... will NOT be fat with human resources.

Companies will start getting measured in REVENUE PER EMPLOYEE ...

RPE... NOT EBITA, profit margins will be the new game.

Soon you'll see that in a museum...

"Plaque of a 2025 entrepreneur bragging about large team size on company site and pitch decks."

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"Do more and more with less and less, until eventually you can do everything with nothing."

My favorite futurist Buckminster Fuller said that in 1938.

...just before WWII kicks off.

He called it ephemeralization.

At the time... and even today... that sounds like the kind of utopian bullshit that philosophers with no connection with the real world say.

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The New Age Of Leverage.

Input : Output

People think that he was talking about cutting budgets or running "lean".

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

He was talking about a fundamental shift in how value gets created.

The model he was working with was industrial: big output needs big input.

Want to manufacture 10,000 units... factory needs 500 workers.

Want to reach 10 million customers? You need an army of salespeople, account managers, and middlemen.

Impact was directly proportional to headcount. Bigger team, bigger result. That was the law.

I think that Fuller saw the stress cracks in that law.

As technology improves, the ratio between input and output inverts.

You'd need less and less physical effort, capital, infrastructure, and people to generate the same or greater result.

NOTE: leverage is an amplification of judgement. If people have shitty judgement, they will have shit at scale.

Eventually, the inputs would touch zero.

He died in 1983. I bet he would've loved the last five years.

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The Numbers No One Takes Seriously Enough

WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion.

55 people.

$345 million of value per employee. Serving 450 million users.

At the time, people called it an anomaly...

"Network effects..."

"Digital products scale differently."

No shit sherlock.

They were technically right, but they didn't know the real reason.

Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion with 13 employees.

Craigslist, for most of its existence, ran on fewer than 50 employees while handling over 80 million ads per month.

Don't get me started on only fans.

These companies achieve this next level because of how they were structured.

They understood, consciously or not, that adding people adds friction more than it adds output.

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The Old Model Was a Necessary Evil

Look at what big headcount actually solved.

In 1960, a company that wanted to expand into a new market had to physically send people there.

Salespeople, ops managers... that's what was required.

You needed boots on the ground because there was no other way to transmit knowledge, intent, or execution at scale.

In 1980, you needed a legal team because contracts were negotiated by humans, reviewed by humans, stored in filing cabinets managed by humans.

You needed an accounting department because someone had to reconcile the books... by hand.

You needed an IT department because the systems were fragile and the only way to keep them running was to have a person who understood them sitting 50 feet away.

Headcount was infrastructure then.

The literal infrastructure the business ran on.

That's changed.

The problem is that most companies never questioned whether they still needed that infrastructure when the environment changed.

They kept hiring because hiring had always meant growth, and growth had always meant hiring.

The two became synonymous when they never really were.

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Something Shifted

In the last decade, something shifted, it was subtle... but as we know, those are the changes that matter the most.

The tools most companies once employed entire departments to maintain became either free, trivially cheap, or automated entirely.

A single person with a laptop now has access to distribution (internet, social, email), comms (Slack, Zoom, async video... loom, etc), creation (design, video, audio...), customer management (CRMs that cost pennies a month or free self hosted open source), financial infrastructure (Stripe, Mercury, accounting APIs), and legal frameworks (template contracts, formation services, e-sig comes w every google workspace).

What used to be 400 people is now 4. Sometimes 1.

Today - with frontier technology that companies like Svperior.com are pioneering - ie - algorithmic governed artificial intelligence - we're on a completely new path.

The ratio is collapsing ... and it's going to shift everything.

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Adapt Or Die

Article content

The previous wave automated tasks.

Software replaced filing staff, spreadsheets replaced data entry teams, CRMs replaced rolodex systems... nothing against rolodex, I kind of wish we still used them.

However ... this wave is automating judgment.

The expensive part of running a company was never the task workers.

It was the people who had to make thousands of small and medium-sized decisions every day.

What to write in this email.

How to handle this client complaint.

What the contract should say.

How to diagnose this bug.

What the marketing copy should sound like.

What research to pull for this proposal.

Those decisions required humans because only humans could do them.

That constraint is dissolving.

A single operator now routes what used to be an entire department's workload.

They're definitely NOT working harder.

The input : output ratio has been separated.

TThe cognitive leverage available to pioneers like us today has compounded faster than any company's hiring can.

The employee is NOT disappearing because people are being fired... that is part of it. But not the entire picture.

They're disappearing because the work that justified their existence is being absorbed into something that doesn't need a salary, doesn't need a benefits package, doesn't call in sick, and doesn't require a desk, workman's comp, insurance, or HR bullshit.

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Small (Or NO) Footprint. Huge Surface Impact Area.

The interesting question everybody thinks about is... "will jobs disappear?"...

That question misses the point and it's being answered slowly and loudly in real time.

The interesting question is: what does a company look like when the old constraints are fully gone?

Fuller saw an answer to this.

His own life was the answer.

He was one person who designed buildings, invented tensegrity structures, wrote 30 books, gave lectures in 87 countries, coined terms still used in design, architecture, and tech half a century later.

He operated with a footprint that should have limited him to the output of one person. His impact was that of a movement.

He did it by understanding leverage.

Conceptual leverage.

He found ideas that compounded, structures that multiplied, principles that could be applied across every context.

The geodesic dome isn't a single dome.

It's a principle that becomes infinite domes.

That's the new operating model.

That's the new OS.

The companies that will matter in the next ten years won't be the ones with the most employees.

Those companies will look like the dinosaurs using mainframes today and coding in cobol (sorry).

The companies that will attract capital and sop up the competition will be the ones that figured out that leverage scales differently now and built accordingly.

Small core, enormous surface area.

Few people, massive reach.

Minimal overhead, maximum output.

Ephemeralization.

Most people now call it "we're integrating AI"... that's a very confused understanding.

Taking a multi-vitamin and taking steroids are both technical medicine.

Two different things.

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My Bottom Line

If you're running a company and your headcount is going up while your output per person is flat or declining, something is wrong.

Not in a competitive-disadvantage, you-might-lose-some-contracts kind of way.

In a fundamentally-misreading-the-environment kind of way.

The model that worked from 1900 to 2020, where growth meant hiring and hiring meant growth, is gone. That ship has sailed.

Not everywhere, not all at once.

But the stress cracks are visible.

You can hear the wood splintering.

The sequoia is going to fall. Soon.

The companies that see it coming are building differently.

Fewer people, extreme levels of leverage.

Less infrastructure, more surface area.

Less headcount, more impact per person.

Exactly what I'm leading across my portfolio of companies and we are bringing a mad edge that will be hard to compete with even as these tools become widely known.

For the last 12 years, at Svperior we've been studying history, systems, leverage and sovereignty.

And we've been working with advanced technology with that context loaded in the background.

We're applying that mad edge for our companies (shit, we've been using recursive self-improvement systems before it shook up Wallstreet 2-3 weeks ago).

We can ship more value in 3 days today, then we could in 7 months in 2024.

Buckle up. Strap in.

Get with the program or get flattened.

Fuller saw this coming 87 years ago.

He'd look at what's happening right now and say: I told you so.