Shopify cut 30% of staff since 2022 while growing revenue 91% to $11 billion, showing lean teams can still scale. OpenAI's latest model beat expectations and Anthropic's response was weak, raising questions about whether the company could hit a $500 billion valuation.
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You don't need half your company, and Palantir and Shopify are proving it. You don't need half your company. Let's look at Shopify for a minute. From peak employee was 2022, 11,600 employees at Shopify. Since then, revenue has grown 91%. Pretty impressive for a company at $11 billion revenue, and employees have gone down from 11,600 to 8,100. Gone down while revenue is up 91%.
It's not as sexy as AGI making us all unemployed, But if you're trying to build a business and you're cursor, this is the best damn thing that ever happened, right? We have a competitive product at one quarter to one tenth the price, and I'm happy.
If I was Anthropic, I would be in that room rejoicing. And I think everyone, when I speak to the Anthropic team, are bluntly laughing. Um, because I mean, the demos were terrible. I think it was entirely underwhelming in terms of the presentation of features. Yeah. Model compatibility into one and model routing, and we've now taken them. That's it. Seriously, we waited for GPT-5 and you gave me a better model?
This is disappointing.
Rory, would you do OpenAI at $500 billion? And do you feel more or less confident post-GPT-5 about OpenAI? I'm going to say more confident.
And I'll tell you why. It goes back to what I said earlier. I think the grandiosity was totally necessary at the start because if you'd walked into people and said, We need to raise $30, $40 billion and at the end of it, we're going to ship this chat app that trust me, people will use as replacement for search. That might not work as well as we're going to change the known universe, we're going to exponentially eliminate all labor. You got to be selling, you know, when you have to raise $30 billion on nothing, you're selling dreams, the future of humanity. We're now at the, I got to make a business, you know, converge roughly on profitability over the next 3 to 5 years. So just go run the business. It's a combination of a just ship, run the business, make it better kind of next step. And the interesting thing is, I'm going to say this, without— and this is where I've come evolved a little in the last few months just thinking about it— without any need for AGI or any of that rubbish, I think both of these companies can be plus or minus half a trillion to trillion-dollar companies. I think the opportunity, it's just so obvious that Everyone's going to be paying $20 a month and people are going to be paying more. And you get an interesting discussion how big the high end will be, which matters more for Anthropic than these guys. But they have the mass market, everybody paying $20 a month. That's a big-ass company. And it's just from here, the throw weight is such that you probably can see a 2, 3x just on that.
