“We're a small team, five people, soon to be ten. The heuristic I have for hiring someone is: are they going to prompt me to do something different than we would have done before? You don't really need people to do work anymore for the kinds of work we're doing. You need people to have visionary insight that adds the DNA of the company. The bottleneck is not execution manpower. The bottleneck is clear articulation of good ideas.”
The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Context
Asked how running a company differs from the pre-agent era, the founder describes an agent-native company with a tiny team. The line set up a later debate over whether displaced white-collar workers can find roles like this.
Transcript
…because when we're in a meeting, if you have a rigorous discussion, that's all creating really rich context from different perspectives for an agent that then goes and like, then you can have a debate and say, okay, go do your conclusion with all the aspects that were mapped out there in there.
What do you feel? You had Forge Global, which you built in the kind of pre-agentic era. What do you feel is the big difference between that era and this era in terms of running a company?
Here's the metric we have. We're a small team. We're like five people, soon to be 10 people right now. And so the heuristic I have for hiring someone is, are they going to prompt me to do something different than we would have done before? You don't really need people to do work anymore for the kinds of work we're doing. You need people to have visionary insight that adds the DNA of the company. That really lets you do things that really like makes you do things that you wouldn't have thought to do otherwise. That no agent, you can't prompt an agent to do for you. So, I think that we're not, we want to build this company in a way that's like building the machine that builds the machine and eventually have more and more agents to spin it up. So, I think that there's a type of company you could start now that does with a dozen people that maybe took a thousand people. And so, we'd like to be one of those companies and have more that go towards tokens just because let's just be really lean and move it, be really agile, and have like a concentration of talent and vision. And it raises the bar too. Another thing that changes is that when you hire people now, the incremental value of interdisciplinary skills…
Great stuff. It's one of the biggest visions we've heard. So, looking forward to following your progress. You got to love the old Act One is coordinating the global economy level of vision. That's really something else. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.…
After Sambit left, with Microsoft offering buyouts to some 60,000 employees that week, Prakash argued the economy has to grow fast enough to absorb the white-collar workers that agents displace. My reply?
I mean, I can see the growth. I have a hard time seeing the job growth picking up enough to offset. I mean, just look at what he just said he had five people, right? But wasn't that a number? Soon to be 10. He said, yeah, we could have a dozen person company that could do the work of a thousand. He…
More from The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
