Post by Jason Radisson

The 3-person unicorn is a myth. So is the solo founder with a laptop and GPT-4.5. The real number is about 10. Senior founding team members, with pattern recognition. Each building and managing their own stack of agents. Let me explain. In the next wave of companies, every operator on the founding team will own a functional domain, and train agents to handle 90%+ of the work in that lane. Not copilots. Not SaaS tools. Trained agents, hillclimbing on proprietary logic and data, are the IP. The result? No junior headcount. No wrappers or SaaS. No middle management. Just a small, senior team with compounding IP and 24/7 leverage. To fund it, you’ll need $10-12M up front, enough for 18 months of senior comp, infra, agent training, and working capital. Not $2M seed rounds. Or SAFE notes built for experimentation and founder education. And that’s where it gets interesting. Most venture firms aren’t designed to fund this kind of company. The team’s too senior. The check’s too big. The plan’s too real. But some capital sources are already there: - Families who know the operators and back the mission - Strategics with shared interest and long-term upside - Operators who understand the architecture Thought partnership from folks like Jeff Rinehart and Rich Williams has really helped clarify this shift. This isn’t a lean startup iterating to product-market fit. They won’t scale headcount. They’ll scale fleets of deeply tuned and trained agents. They won’t build for incumbents, or help incumbents replace headcount. They’ll build to replace incumbents. And that changes everything. If you’re building like this, or investing in teams that are, DM me. Would love to connect. #AI #AIAgents #OrgDesign #Startups #FutureOfWork #AgentNative