Short YouTube discussion (Jason M. Lemkin and others) comparing company efficiency and AI developments. Lemkin cites Shopify shrinking headcount from a 2020 peak of 11,600 to 8,100 while revenue rose 91% (company revenue cited ~USD 11 billion), using this as evidence that companies can ‘thrive with less.’ Other speakers comment on AI company demos and competition (Anthropic, OpenAI, GPT-5).
Questions this video answers
11,600 (peak, cited as in 2020).
8,100 employees.
91%.
About USD 11 billion.
You don't need half your company. And Palantir and Shopify are proving that you don't need half your company. Let's look at Shopify for a minute. From peak employee was 2020 to 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 1/4 to 1/10 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 because, I mean, the demos were terrible. I think it was entirely underwhelming in terms of the presentation of features, model compatibility into one and model routing. And we've now taken them. That's it. Seriously. We waited GPT5 and you gave me better model. This is disappointing. Rory, would you do OpenAI at 500 billion and do you feel more or less confident post GPT5 about OpenAI?
I'm going to say more confident and I'll tell you why. It goes back to what I said earlier, right? 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 gotta be selling. When you have to raise 30 billion on nothing, you're selling dreams, the future of humanity. We're now at the I gotta make a business, you know, converge roughly on profitability over the next three to five years. So just go on the business. It's a combination of a just ship, run the business, make it better kind of next step. So, yeah, I feel like. 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, right? 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 bucks 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 Entropic than these guys. But they have the mass market, everybody paying 20 bucks a month. That's a big ass company. And it's just from here the throw rate is such that you probably can see a 2, 3x just on that.
