Small teams got dangerous

Obsidian has 7 full-time employees. Around $25M ARR. A $350M valuation. No VC, no scheduled meetings, no stand-ups. About a million users per person on staff. And they built all of it before AI was even a serious part of the conversation. Just the right team, the right product, and a flat structure by design. That used to be an anomaly.

It’s becoming the template.

Greg Isenberg put it cleanly: “Obsidian is a $350M company for a note taking app built by 3 engineers working remotely. No other time in history was something like this possible.” He’s right. Seven people total, three of them engineers. The rest of the headcount is design, support, and product. No layers. No middle. Deep focus, as Steph Ango (@kepano) describes it, is the actual operating principle.

What’s changed is the math on leverage. AI handles coordination. It handles the first draft, the second pass, the boilerplate, the integration glue. The handoffs that used to justify hiring coordinators are getting automated. When the bottleneck disappears, the layer built around managing it disappears too. Not as a philosophy. Just as a consequence.

Greg again, on where this goes: two real people, twelve agents. “Your about page is going to look the same.” Flat isn’t a choice anymore. It’s the default org structure for anyone building something new.

He’s also been tracking the economics at the smaller end. A two-person team. Year one, $480k in revenue. Year three, $1.9M ARR, exiting at $10-15M. That path exists now. Not because anyone got lucky, but because the cost structure changed. “The most capital efficient path to a software exit that exists right now.” A hundred customers at $500/month is a real business. A thousand true fans is now a hundred.

Here’s the part that gets missed, though. AI doesn’t raise everyone’s game equally. It raises the ceiling for people who are already good. A great developer with AI is now a team. A sharp product person with AI is now a department. The leverage is real, and it compounds. “Founder-agent fit is what matters now. Can you direct a fleet of agents like a film director? That’s the new unfair advantage.” If you’re already good at what you do, the window right now is genuinely extraordinary.

This is what we’re building toward at mx.works. Small, flat, dangerous. The tools exist. The economics work. The only thing left is doing the work well enough to deserve the leverage. We think that’s a pretty exciting place to be.