Jason M. Lemkin and two speakers discuss how ten people now generate $20 million in annual revenue, a ratio impossible a decade ago. Once companies hit $50-$100 million ARR, they need dozens of mediocre hires in sales and operations that slow growth. The panel debates whether AI eliminates these constraints or just delays them, and why enterprise deals still require human deal desks while SMB models go self-service.
I think it's kind of one of the coolest. We're 10 people and we're generating $20 million in revenue. Like those kinds of ratios we wouldn't have seen a decade ago. And now, you know, people are striving for it. And we hear it from founders. Like we, you know, we only have this many people. We don't want to hire people. We're raising capital, but we're not hiring. That's unusual. That's a very different pitch.
Do you think— I'm making this number up, but I think it's about right. And Victor could probably, for a case study, and then maybe we can break. That makes it— that's what I see too, right? My, my— and listen, the world's changing so quickly today, right? I even did the whole Deepsea thing. It feels like everything's faster than it was a week ago. But it feels to me there's still the issue around 200, 300 employees where you still end up needing 10 people to do everything. And what I feel like this 10 people can get to $10 million ARR thing, it just shifts the time. Like instead of me needing— but it's still at $100 million, at $50 million ARR, I need so many humans. And honestly, so many mediocre humans, you start having to hire— okay, maybe that's the wrong term. You start after hiring A-minus tier and B-tier, no matter— even though you can't say it out loud. And it just takes so many people to do some of the basic stuff, and you need so many salespeople and so many mediocre renewals people. And I just see everything still gumming up today at that size. Maybe if AI gets rid of that roadblock, that'd be awesome. But I wonder if it just shifts— kicks the can down the road a year or two.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like Salesforce hiring 1,000 salespeople to sell their SDR salespeople, right? The agents. I think there's still a lag. Like, I think we'll— I think it'll be definitely more efficient. But I still think that we're far from you being able to, you know, like, at least when you create like true enterprise software, I do think that's a bit different than, than like more consumer or like SMBs where you don't need the human touch. But it still feels difficult to close. It'd be very interesting if a company with like 20,000 employees, whatever, gets to close like million-dollar deals with enterprise. I think that would be like a really interesting kind of tipping point. But so far, for most of the ones that I've seen, at least, it's still a lot of like, you know, self-service credit card revenue or like, you know, kind of smaller sales because it's still just very difficult managing a deal desk, right? It's like you just need people for that.
Well, maybe let me just wrap. Let me ask one last version of this to you, Tomasz, then we could wrap. And this was great. So when we start, when you and I started, Tomasz, a lot of VCs would yell at founders and say you've got to offshore to save money. You've got everything. So that the magic solution when we started, maybe you too, Victor, the magic solution with VCs was have 50 or 60% of your India offshore. That would magically cut your costs, right? Magically, because developers are fungible, they're all the same. So just hire a bunch of folks in some country you've never personally visited. And that's my VC solution. Is the new version today— the version of today is if you're good at AI, you only need 10 developers.
