Belle Lin

You can look at the definition as a startup that has maybe less than 100 employees and is tracking revenue per employee.

So they're looking at efficiency as one of the most important metrics very early on.

And that's more important to them in some cases than growth, because the old way of looking at things in Silicon Valley was that you had these companies that were just trying to grow as quickly as possible.

These startups that considered it a badge of honor to have a lot of employees.

And that was something you touted in a press release.

But nowadays, it's really about staying small and lean and very mean.

According to some folks in Silicon Valley, it is very possible.

You have folks like Sam Altman, who has touted this idea.

And with the rise of AI agents like OpenClaw, that was very viral a few weeks ago, this personal AI agent that can do a lot of things on your behalf.

It's very likely that you have millions of these agents working on behalf of one person and then you start generating the revenue like a billion dollars.

And so it's very possible, but there's a lot of technical infrastructure that needs to be built before we get there.

That is also a possibility.

I spoke with a startup called Forethought that realized it needed to pivot and so went through a round of layoffs and is now tracking revenue per headcount.

And so you don't need to necessarily be lean from the get-go, from what I've heard from these startups.

You can also take on the lean persona.

One investor that I spoke to said that it can really...

hamper growth from the start and investors do also like seeing growth efficiency is important but growth is also essential and so in areas like sales enterprise sales specifically so selling to large companies that's a place where you still need people to cater to

the whims and demands of large enterprise clients.

And so that isn't changing anytime soon.

And then another startup I talked to said that they realized their people were under-resourced.