I work for a tiny startup, and at this exact moment in history, a tiny startup is the best place you can be.

three is the new thirty

Three excellent senior developers can now move as quickly as 30. They know the whole product, work with full autonomy, own their changes, they can turn on a dime without needing to run it by fifteen people for permission. When they go home at night, their 10 agent sessions keep going. They're coding 24 hours a day. Their home-cooked agent harness is a turbo-charged manifestation of their decades of engineering expertise.

A few years ago, used to be you'd build a product a certain way and then look for customers who might want it. Then you tried to convince them it was a perfect fit. But if a huge opportunity came along which didn't quite fit into that mould, tough shit. It just wasn't going to happen.

But today? A tiny startup can walk into a client meeting and confidently say yes to any weirdo requirement they want, even the ones that would've been a fuck no a year ago. Need an entirely new feature? yes. A bespoke version of the app for your company? you got it. Need it by Friday, white labeled, with an API, SDK and a Chrome extension? fuck it, we ball.

elephant hunting

conventional tech companies may have a killer sales team, dozens of engineers, big fat stacks of fuck-you-money - but they're just. too. slow. they gotta coordinate the work between four departments, pass it through eight layers of regulatory procedure, get stakeholder approval, wade through a muddy river of organizational friction. This was supposed to be compensated by their ability to throw their massive weight behind an initiative and do way more work than a startup could ever keep up with, but I don't think that's true anymore.

In 2026, by the time that big-ass company has figured out which department even owns the requirement, the tiny startup has already finished building the pilot.

if you're big and slow right now, you should be shaking in your booties. it's elephant hunting season. 🐘