You don't need a company to build a company anymore
AI zaps headcount and kills the org chart.
The best companies of the future will have no employees.
Not long ago, companies pointed to scale as a measure of success. Growth meant headcount, more people meant higher output, and labor meant value.
This formula is dead.
AI has broken the link between size and productivity. Each day, the cost of execution collapses closer to zero. Free tools can now write code, generate art, spin up marketing campaigns, and organize data without looping in another human.
The media warns that AI will take jobs, but the shift is deeper than that. AI isn’t just replacing individual roles. It’s replacing the organization itself as the default structure for work.
I’ve learned this firsthand the last year building Opening Bell Daily — a media startup with two founders and zero employees.
If we launched this five years ago, we likely would have had to hire staff early on.
Our art department, for example, is me using AI. I generated, edited, and published the following images using ChatGPT and MidJourney.
The same is true of our marketing department.
With a few minutes of targeted prompting, ChatGPT helped me create a series of old-fashioned, Mad Men-style ads for my financial newsletter.
AI is replacing the need for organizations to be the default type of company. One or two-person operations have never been more viable business models.
The individual can now be the firm.
Not in the sense that Elon Musk is Tesla or Jamie Dimon is JPMorgan, but in an operational sense. Scale is no longer about expanding labor. One person really can do it all.
My friend Andrew Yeung calls it the “10x Operator Era.” In this new economy, leverage comes from compressing processes rather than raising headcount. Managers are giving way to systems architects.
We are in the very early, very fast-moving days of a transition where we go from an industrial mindset to a computational one. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, has called AI a more profound technology than fire.
Before, it made sense to measure scale as an accumulation of effort. Moving forward, we’ll value it by its elimination.
This shift means we can de-prioritize infrastructure by orders of magnitude. A single person with good taste and a few tools can scale a product and create a robust ecosystem.
Minimal friction, maximum force.
I don’t think institutions are dead. But they are losing their status as gatekeepers of ambition. Corporations must adapt to a landscape where tiny teams can achieve important work at scale, with fewer bottlenecks and smaller payroll.
Individuals can be empires, and bloated org charts will be reserved for the government.
When people ask whether we plan to build out a newsroom at Opening Bell Daily, I tell them we already did.
We just didn’t need the headcount.
Have a great Easter weekend.
Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief of Opening Bell Daily
For more of my recent essays on AI and the future of work:
