Excellent article. What I'm seeing (my main company does staff aug for tech startups) is that companies under $5mm or $3mm ARR are building leaner AI-augmented team. I think long gone are the days of building 10 person teams who build MVPs in 12 months.
I'd love to see a follow analysis of the staying power of these companies. Now that Google has acquired Windsurf, how long before Gemini (With AI studio) kills them with capital? I used to work for Qlik and we saw this directly with PowerBI. We'd enter meetings, win over the business teams with a superior product, but architects would time and time again highlight that PowerBI can do 75% of the value of Qlik for 10% of the price. My fear is that moat here is too slim
Here's one takeaway I'm getting: if you’re a founder under $5M ARR, consider that most startups *still* over-hire engineers and under-invest in marketing and growth long past the point where GTM, not product, is their real bottleneck
Fair? Wonder how else people are seeing this from a "what should I do this week" angle
Love it!
Excellent article. What I'm seeing (my main company does staff aug for tech startups) is that companies under $5mm or $3mm ARR are building leaner AI-augmented team. I think long gone are the days of building 10 person teams who build MVPs in 12 months.
I'd love to see a follow analysis of the staying power of these companies. Now that Google has acquired Windsurf, how long before Gemini (With AI studio) kills them with capital? I used to work for Qlik and we saw this directly with PowerBI. We'd enter meetings, win over the business teams with a superior product, but architects would time and time again highlight that PowerBI can do 75% of the value of Qlik for 10% of the price. My fear is that moat here is too slim
Hi Kyle, great insights here. Do you know where startup teams are finding fractional GTM, primarily sales, talent?
Here's one takeaway I'm getting: if you’re a founder under $5M ARR, consider that most startups *still* over-hire engineers and under-invest in marketing and growth long past the point where GTM, not product, is their real bottleneck
Fair? Wonder how else people are seeing this from a "what should I do this week" angle