 | A few days ago, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in an interview with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, envisioned a new type of startup for the AI era: the solo unicorn company, predicting that its emergence is not far off. Altman mentioned that within a small group of tech company CEOs, they have a bet on when the first billion-dollar company with only one person will appear—a scenario unimaginable without AI but now becoming a reality. 1. James Currier, a partner at NFX, also believes it's a question of when, not if, this will happen. Despite significant adjustments in the venture capital industry over the past two years, with some unicorns becoming "unicorpse," some investors believe we are entering a new golden age of startups. The essence of startups is rapid action, and AI is expected to dramatically amplify this capability by automating many processes that previously required more human operation. Last year, James Currier wrote an article, "The 3-Person Unicorn Startup," arguing that with the next generation of AI tools, a highly talented trio could automate workflows to grow a software-centric business to over $100 million in revenue, allowing founders to do more with less. This perspective aligns with the broader vision of the evolving role of AI in reshaping the startup ecosystem, highlighting the potential for significantly leaner teams to achieve monumental success. The reason is what he referred to as Allometric Scaling. I looked it up, and the general meaning of this term is:
James Currier says that in the AI era, all companies are undergoing allometric scaling. You will notice that AI changes the relationship between the size of your company and its metabolism, growth, and heartbeat in many different ways. If you can reduce the number of employees, every business operation becomes simpler. Fewer people mean fewer meetings for founders, fewer disagreements, less political strife, faster decision-making, and faster experiments; fewer people mean less recruitment, interviewing, hiring, onboarding training, mentoring, performance evaluations, culture building, dramatic departures, and dismissals; fewer people mean less spending on salaries, less time spent on fundraising, less capital raised from venture capital firms, and less dilution for founders. James says he has already seen some tools that can independently create some simple functions and basically do not require human participation. Some businesses have reduced their customer service teams by 90% after using AI customer service. Therefore, James says although AI will not replace you, a person with AI will. As for what type of one-person unicorn companies will be, there is a consensus that it is only possible in consumer-facing software products. In fact, those small teams with high valuations (high income) are basically in this field, for example, Instagram, which had only 13 employees when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012; WhatsApp (35 engineers supported 450 million users when it was acquired for $16 billion), and the current AI era's Midjourney. Whether it is a one-person unicorn company or a three-person unicorn company, essentially, it is about AI replacing a large number of workflows previously completed by humans. But another aspect that we might have overlooked is the aforementioned Allometric Scaling. With the change in the organization and fewer people, the huge changes it brings to the entire ecosystem may be something we cannot predict at the moment. 2. ServiceNow's financial report also made us feel the tremendous value AI brings to existing businesses. ServiceNow currently has 3 product lines with ACV values exceeding $1 billion, and 11 individual product lines with ACV values exceeding $250 million. Its CEO Bill McDermott said at the earnings conference that ServiceNow's newly released AI products contributed the most ACV among all their new product lines, finding that customers are willing to pay more:
In addition to external customers willing to pay more, AI has brought real value to these companies by improving efficiency internally. Bill McDermott said that just in development, using AI has increased their developers' speed of innovation by 52%. ServiceNow's ARR has already broken through $10 billion and is still growing at a rate of 27%. It has over 1900 customers with more than $1 million in revenue, and the rate of employee growth is lower than that of revenue growth, meaning its profits are growing with the company's growth, which is not easy for a company with $10 billion in ARR. 3. Recently, there is a project on GitHub called GPT Newspaper, which is a product driven entirely by AI Agents that can create personalized newspapers based on user preferences. This GPT Newspaper consists of 6 AI Agents, basically realizing all the work of traditional media: Search Agent: Searches the web for the latest, most relevant news. Curator Agent: Filters and selects news based on user-defined preferences and interests. Writer Agent: Creates compelling and reader-friendly articles. Critique Agent: Provides feedback to the author until the article is approved for publication. Designer Agent: Layouts and designs articles for a visually appealing reading experience. Editor Agent: Builds newspapers based on the produced articles. Publisher Agent: Publishes the newspaper to the front end or required service. The following is the general workflow of this Newspaper: It's conceivable that AI might experience a significant boom in 2024, not just within startups but also in the wider adoption by existing businesses on a larger scale. Reference: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/could-ai-create-one-person-120000722.html https://www.nfx.com/post/3-person-unicorn-startup https://github.com/assafelovic/gpt-newspaper?tab=readme-ov-file [link] [comments] |
Predictive technology: computational social science
