This is how lean teams are building giant companies

Welcome to 📈🧠 Scale Smarter.

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• 2 roads to startup growth in 2025: Efficiency vs acceleration (Crunchbase News)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• From startups to self-care: Why young founders must prioritize mental health (Entrepreneur)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• People with ADHD are sharing their weirdest productivity hacks (BuzzFeed)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• AI tool can write and evaluate business plans as well as or better than humans can  (Phys.org)

💡 Hiring Insights

• The job market is frozen (The Atlantic)

👀 ICYMI

• Building a high performing remote company (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🎯 From bloated teams to surgical hiring

We’ve moved on from the trend of raising a large seed/A round, staffing up quickly with that newfound treasure chest, and figuring out the org chart later on.

Unless you’re an AI company building world changing LLMs, the days of sky-high valuations 18 months ago have passed us.

Investors are much more cautious these days, asking tougher questions:

• Why this hire?

• What are they solving for?

• Do you need a team of 10, or just a couple high performing operators with the right tools?

Since the advent of this next phase of GenAI, the trend with founders is moving towards building companies with smaller teams, leaner operations, with a much tighter focus on outcomes.

AI is being used not to replace people, but rather to amplify the impact of every great hire.

Skip potential, hire for mastery

While hiring the smart generalist is never a bad strategy, there’s a trend starting where companies are hiring people who have seen the playbook and know how to run it and then surrounding this person with one or two executors, alongside AI tools to automate as much of the process around them as possible.

When you think of hiring for this kind of role ask yourself:

Has this person done this successfully before and can they own it end to end?

This gives you an idea of how much you need to surround this person when it comes to people and tools.

Surround your A+ hire with AI-powered leverage

From scheduling and inbox support to customer service and internal reporting, AI tools are becoming an integral part of the org chart.

Your teams will be enabled with a ghostwriter through Notion AI for drafting docs, summarizing meeting notes, and turning data collected from all over your org into clear action items.

Superhuman AI or Gmail’s Gemini assistant handles auto-drafting emails, summarizing threads, and speeds up communication without sacrificing quality, enabling your hires to handle more communication without unnecessarily overloading them.

Meanwhile Claude or ChatGPT works really well for analyzing and interpreting data (sales numbers, CSAT scores, etc.) without needing a data analyst - immediately giving your teams the insights they need.

Solve for roles, not resumes

Before you open a new role, define the problem - not the person.

A common mistake companies make is hiring for what they think they need, not what the business actually needs.

Instead of asking, “Who do we need to hire?”, you should be asking, “What is the biggest constraint in our business and will a new hire actually solve it?”

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently emphasized this approach by mandating that before requesting additional headcount, teams must demonstrate why AI cannot fulfill the task. In an internal memo, Lütke stated:

"Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI."

🕹️ The operator who orchestrates

Not only are you thinking of how to build teams and operate them more efficiently when you’re looking at using AI tools, you’re also looking at yourself and how you show up to manage the company without bloated teams.

Try a problem-to-solve map

When you’re only focused on hiring for what truly matters, you’re forced to think and act much more deliberately.

Clarity becomes the superpower.

Every quarter create a “problem-to-solve” map where you write down your 3-5 biggest business constraints.  Then map out whether the solution is a hire, a system, or a tool.  You’ll naturally start to hire to solve versus hire to scale headcount.

From manager to system designer

When you’re hiring to solve, the focus isn’t as much on people management (which is still very important) but on how to build systems around employees so that they can do their best work.

Whether it’s AI tools, automated processes, or anything else that will enable highly proficient employees to do more with less of a team, your job is to build the systems around the employees so that they give you their best work.

Stay close to these systems by setting up weekly reviews with employees to learn what’s working well and what needs improvement so that systems can be modified before they break or disable employees from being able to do their jobs.

Build a “No-Hire-Until” Checklist

As you’re scaling your company, every hire is very crucial, especially if you’re surrounding them with tools to run efficient lean teams.  However it’s important to know when you should make the decision to hire.

This checklist will help you decide on when to hire:

✅ Have I clearly defined the outcome this role is responsible for?

✅ Have I mapped out the workflows and validated that AI or automation can’t do most of it?

✅ Have I documented the processes so this person can hit the ground running?

✅ Is this the highest-leverage thing I can invest in right now?

If you can’t check all the boxes, it’s not time to hire yet.

AI has clearly re-defined what a team looks like, especially when you see small companies scaling to enormous amounts of revenue...

Now a team might include one world-class operator, three high-output generalists, a stack of AI tools, and systems that work while you sleep.

When you build this way from the start, scale doesn’t just get easier, it gets cheaper, clearer, and more resilient. And most importantly, you’re building a foundation that won’t break every time you scale.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Embed AI tools wherever you can drive efficiencies

• Scale Yourself → Build a “no-hire-until” checklist for your next hire

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.