AI Agents and the 2-Pizza Rule: Next Gen Startup Team
Organisation's growth isn’t the number of employees it hires but the revenue generated per employee with small team. Focus on building a passionate team and leveraging AI agents for the rest.
2 Pizza Rule = Productivity
Jeff Bezos shared a simple but profound idea: "You should be able to feed your team with just two pizzas." That’s the ideal team size.
In the age of AI, this translates to a team of 6 to 8 highly skilled individuals—a compact, focused group that can achieve extraordinary results by leveraging the power of AI. The investors foresee that the next unicorn will be with a 3 Person Unicorn team.
AI is facilitating a move from individual and specific expertise, to generalist skills and the ability to product-manage AI tools. All will need to have project management skills, but each might have a talent and personality slant:
The Founder: Aggressive Visionary Archetype
The Numbers Person
The Words Person
To be honest, considering the pace of innovation, I strongly believe that if you're building a tech startup today, you don’t need hundreds of engineers. Instead, you need a small, passionate team that deeply understands the problem you're solving. Combine that with the ability to utilize AI agents, and you effectively have hundreds of virtual workers at your disposal.
You don’t need managers to oversee countless employees. What you need is an “AI-first” approach. Every problem or task should start with this question: Can we automate this? Focus your time and energy on areas that truly require human intervention.
Almost every company spends over 95% of its time doing what every other company does.
And it spends less than 5% of its time on things that are unique to the company.
That makes no sense.
— Auren Hoffman (@auren)October 27, 2019
My Ideal Team
My dream team for a tech startup would look like this, who are super generalists, specialists in one and know a bit of coding. You only have your core team that are really core to the problem you are trying to solve.
A Marketing Head who knows AI
An Operations Head who knows AI
A Sales Head who knows AI
A Tech Head who knows AI
A CEO who knows AI
A Designer who knows AI
A Product Head who knows AI
A Finance Head who knows AI
Each member would be an expert in their field and capable of building and managing their own AI agents—perfect employees who don’t complain, don’t take breaks, and execute tasks efficiently.
With advanced tools like Open Interpreter, Browser Use, and Anthropic - Computer Use, agents can:
Operate your computer
Access and manage files
Work with documentation, emails, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint presentations
The Benefits of an AI-Driven Team
Running a company powered by AI agents has unparalleled advantages:
No need to manage employees
No motivation sessions for productivity
No egos to deal with
No time wasted convincing people to build or not build something
Zero office politics
The only goal? Getting things done.
It’s about collaborating with like-minded people on a mission you all believe in. Work becomes enjoyable, satisfying, and incredibly efficient. Work satisfaction MAX!!
The Role of AI Agents
AI agents can be your ideal employees. They can take on repetitive, boring tasks and be continuously upskilled with every LLM upgrade. They enable you to scale without scaling your workforce.
However, some roles still require humans—for example, customer service and sales—because people inherently trust individuals more than machines. The reason? Humans have empathy, a quality AI has yet to replicate. There’s also risk of ethical issues, lack of creativity and many others as well.
I am not sure when this kind a organisation structure would become a reality but this will happen. My ideal team size for a tech company would be 10 missionary people and 100’s of agents to get the task done.
If you have missed reading few of my previous posts, please check them out here
As Auren Hoffman said:
“If you start stripping out everything that is not unique to your company, you’re left with just a few people who make the unique parts of the company. And then add a few people who need to explain its unique benefits to the market. Imagine your 100 person company going to 6 people. Imagine your 1000 person company going to 20. How much faster could you move?”
Platforms to Build Your own AI Agents
We are still at early stages of building AI Agents. Few of the emerging frameworks and platforms you can leverage to build your own AI agents are as follows:
CrewAI - Open Source
Relevanceai - I have written a blog on this , do check out. https://www.thetoolnerd.com/p/relevanceai-make-your-own-workforce
Flowise - Open Source
Langflow - Open Source
Phidata - Open Source
Microsoft Autogen(Open Source) & Copilot Studio - I have written a post about it here : https://www.thetoolnerd.com/p/microsoft-copilot-studio-thetoolnerd
OpenAI Swarm Agents - Open Source
Anthropic - ComputerUse - Open Source
and a ton of them more. There are agents being built and shipped every day. I have a list of AI Agents and platforms listed on my tools directory : tools.thetoolnerd.com
The Investor Perspective
They are able to see that AI is reshaping the team size and structure and they have predicted it happening a couple of years back itself.
The AI-driven team isn’t just a possibility—it’s an inevitability. With the right tools, mindset, and focus, you can build a lean, efficient, and mission-driven organization that thrives in the era of automation.