Being small is the advantage now

A team of one built an app builder called Base44 and sold it to Wix for around 80 million dollars. One person. No office, no sales department, no board meetings.

Last time I asked why more startups are going to win in the AI era. This is part of my answer.

For years big companies had one thing small ones could not buy. People. Hundreds of them. Lawyers, designers, analysts, support, marketing. If you wanted to compete you needed a building full of salaries.

Now a small team can rent a lot of that for the price of a few subscriptions.

And the big company still has the meetings. The approvals. The old systems nobody wants to touch. The fear of breaking something that already makes money.

A startup has nothing to break. It can try a new tool on Monday and change the whole process by Friday.

I went through a list of tiny AI teams doing over a million a year, most of them one to five people (self reported, so take it with some salt): https://select.keenable.ai/r/lean-ai-products-at-1m-arr-2025-sep-2026/WwKmTVPhPPZWlOclJqrBSg

Does it mean every small business wins? No. Building is cheap now, so there will be more competition than ever.

It means size is not the moat anymore. Speed is. Knowing your customer is. Funny, those were always the small guy's strengths :)