Jason M. Lemkin and guests discuss startups where 10 people generate $20 million in revenue. They explore why scaling to 50-300 employees requires hiring many mediocre workers, why enterprise sales still needs humans to close deals, and whether AI will fix that or just postpone the problem.
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 have seen.
Yeah.
A decade ago. And now, you know, people are striving for. And we hear 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. 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 we. Maybe we can break that makes it. That's what I see too. Right. My. My endless in the world's changing so quickly today. Right. I even did whole deep sea 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 when I feel like this 10 people can get to 10 million error thing it just shifts the time like instead of me needing. But it's still at 2, at 100 million, at 50 million error. 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 a thousand 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 be 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 like more consumer or like SMPs. But 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 employees, whatever gets to close like million dollar deals with the 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 is still a lot of like, you know, self service credit card revenue or like you know, kind of smaller sales deal 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 Tomoz then we could wrap and this was great. So when we start, when you and I started to a lot of VCs would yell at founders and say you've got to offshore to save money. You've got everything told that the magic solution when we started maybe you too Victor. The magic solution was VCs was have set 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 tend to developers.
