India’s at a crossroads—not of left or right, but of reason vs rhetoric. The real battle isn’t political. It’s between those who question—and those who blindly follow.
A.I. Is Changing How Silicon Valley Builds Start-Ups Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast. Now artificial intelligence tools are making workers more productive and spurring tales of “tiny team” success. ..................... The company is among a growing cohort of start-ups, most of them working on A.I. products, that are also using A.I. to maximize efficiency. ........ Almost every day, Grant Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, hears from investors who try to persuade him to take their money. Some have even sent him and his co-founders personalized gift baskets. ........ It is using artificial intelligence tools to increase its employees’ productivity in everything from customer service and marketing to coding and customer research. ......... His company has hired only 28 people to get “tens of millions” in annual recurring revenue and nearly 50 million users. Gamma is also profitable. .......... “If we were from the generation before, we would easily be at 200 employees” ..........
The biggest bragging rights for these start-ups are for making the most revenue with the fewest workers.
........... Anysphere, a start-up that makes the coding software Cursor, hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years with just 20 employees, and how ElevenLabs, an A.I. voice start-up, did the same with around 50 workers. ........... Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has predicted there could someday be a one-person company worth $1 billion. ......... DeepSeek’s inexpensive techniques. ......... compared new A.I. start-ups to the wave of companies that arose in the late 2000s, after Amazon began offering cheap cloud computing services. That lowered the cost of starting a company, leading to a flurry of new start-ups that could be built more cheaply. ......... Before this A.I. boom, start-ups generally burned $1 million to get to $1 million in revenue, Mr. Jain said. Now getting to $1 million in revenue costs one-fifth as much and could eventually drop to one-tenth, according to an analysis of 200 start-ups conducted by Afore. ......... Last year, A.I. companies raised $97 billion in funding, making up 46 percent of all venture investment in the United States ........ At Gamma, employees use about 10 A.I. tools to help them be more efficient, including Intercom’s customer service tool for handling problems, Midjourney’s image generator for marketing, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for data analysis and Google’s NotebookLM for analyzing customer research. Engineers also use Anysphere’s Cursor to more efficiently write code. .......... At Gamma, Mr. Lee said he planned to roughly double the work force this year to 60, hiring for design, engineering and sales. He plans to recruit a different type of worker from before, seeking out generalists who do a range of tasks rather than specialists who do only one thing, he said. He also wants “player-coaches” instead of managers — people who can mentor less experienced employees but can also pitch in on the day-to-day work. ........ Mr. Lee said the A.I.-efficient model had freed up time he would have otherwise spent managing people and recruiting. Now he focuses on talking to customers and improving the product. In 2022, he created a Slack room for feedback from Gamma’s top users, who are often shocked to discover that the chief executive was responding to their comments.
