Smaller Is Better in Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Moment | Lora Kelley
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In many industries, leading a big team is a flex. A large head count implies a large budget, and suggests that your organization is powerful and making things happen. But lately, in the world of start-ups, some founders have been bragging about doing more with fewer people.
Silicon Valley has embraced “ tiny teams,” celebrating high revenue-to-worker ratios and groups of “high agency” employees, who each get plenty done with artificial intelligence. A site billing itself as the “tiny teams hall of fame,” a directory of such companies, has garnered some media attention. Dan Shipper, who runs the media start-up Every, recently coined a spinoff term on the phenomenon — the “ two-slice team,” consisting of just one person plus A.I. tools.
The idea borrows from Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule,” his notion from two decades ago that teams at Amazon should not be so large that they require more than two pies of pizza. Now, Mr. Shipper argues that only two slices of pizza are needed. The person can eat them both; the A.I. agent doesn’t get hungry.
“One person can now do so much more” than in the past, Mr. Shipper said in an interview. At his start-up, several products — including an A.I. writing tool and an A.I. file organizer — are each managed by one employee (who can call in for help from colleagues across the organization as needed). This approach, he argues, enables his small, early-stage start-up to build various products in a way that “used to only be available to really big companies with huge budgets.”
It’s perhaps counterintuitive, he said, but the strategy has allowed him to hire more people overall, expanding to more than 20 employees this year. Without the A.I.-heavy, two-slice team approach, he said, “we would be a much smaller company because we would not have been able to build any of the stuff that has caused our growth.”
Some business leaders are making extreme predictions about tiny teams. Sam Altman, for example, the chief executive of OpenAI, has suggested that a one-person company reaching a billion-dollar valuation may not be far off. Mr. Shipper’s conception, however, is less stark. He sees firms restructuring into a series of small teams, each run by one or a few people, ideally without mass job losses.
There have always been trade-offs between big and small organizations. Though large teams may struggle with communication and buy-in around common goals, they “excel at solving problems,” said Dashun Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. “Small teams come up with problems for them to solve.” In his 2019 research about team sizes in science and technology, he found that small teams tend to introduce new ideas while bigger ones are good at developing existing ideas. One format, he said, is not necessarily better than the other.
Large Teams Have Developed Science and Technology; Small Teams Have Disrupted It
Authors: Lingfei Wu 123, Dashun Wang4,5, James A. Evans1,2,3* Affiliations: 1 Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637. 2 Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago, 5735 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637. 3 Computation Institute, University of Chicago, 5735 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637. 4 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, IL 60208. 5 Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, 600 Foster Street, Evanston, IL 60208. *Corresponding author. E-mail: jevans@uchicago.edu (J.A.E.)
Abstract: Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent, popular ideas, while small teams disrupted the system by drawing on older and less prevalent ideas. Attention to work from large teams came immediately, while advances by small teams succeeded further into the future. Differences between small and large teams magnify with impact—small teams have become known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work. Differences in topic and research design account for part of the relationship between team size and disruption, but most of the effect occurs within people, controlling for detailed subject and article type. Our findings suggest the importance of supporting both small and large teams for the sustainable vitality of science and technology.
One Sentence Summary: Data on more than 50 million teams in science and technology reveal systematic, fundamental differences between works produced by small and large teams: Across a wide variety of domains, small teams tend to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, while large teams develop existing ones, suggesting the importance of both for continuing advance through discovery and invention.
Even the smallest team of humans will bring together people with different expertise and perspectives. But today, Dr. Wang noted, any addition to a one-person team is likely to be named ChatGPT or Claude. A risk of tiny teams that rely on A.I., he added, is that “now all of a sudden they look a lot more similar, because they, in some sense, have collaborated with the same person” (who, of course, is not actually a person).
Those new teammates, alas, cannot enjoy pizza. Humans, however, still can and do. Mr. Shipper’s go-to New York-style order: two slices of margherita, folded and eaten standing at the counter.