Silicon Valley loves to preach the gospel of lean teams. But Google’s vice president of product said that mentality can kill great ideas.
Robby Stein said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Saturday, that there’s a “cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly” culture in the tech world.
“At some level, it’s true for internal conviction, but to build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technological breakthrough, a lot of times I see teams just give up too early or underinvest in the product,” he added.
Stein helped launch Instagram Stories before joining Google to lead its AI-powered search products. He said products weren’t built overnight, even for software. He pointed to the massive effort behind foundational AI models — projects that took years and hundreds of people — as proof that some breakthroughs require scale and patience.
Teams can sometimes take scrappiness too far, staying small for so long that their ideas never gain traction, Stein said. If a product doesn’t get good enough internally in a big company, “it just dies on the vine,” he added.
Startups don’t have the luxury of endlessly iterating with tiny teams. By the time they learn what works, it may be too late, Stein said.
He added that founders need to think early about what kind of team can build a strong version of their product, rather than clinging to the idea that two people can stay lean until they hit product-market fit.
Stein said there are two milestones that signal it’s time to invest and scale: internal conviction, when a team feels it’s found something special, and external validation, when real users — not just friends — keep coming back.
“Invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can to get it out the door and to ship it,” he said.
“You can only really do that with the right group,” he added.
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Stein and Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The Tiny Teams era
Startups in the AI era are proving that they can scale quickly, reduce spending, and thrive against competition with a handful of employees.
Some of AI’s biggest names have built upon tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the maker of coding copilot Cursor, which grew from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year with fewer than 50 employees, per private market research platform Sacra.
“We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.
Big Tech is also taking cues from the lean-team playbook. Meta’s superintelligence AI unit is led by a handful of star researchers and represents a fraction of Meta’s total workforce of over 70,000 employees. Many of its members, including leader Alexandr Wang, were hired from buzzy AI startups.
“I’ve just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small, talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research,” Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s earnings call in July.
Business Insider in May compiled a list of the highest-valued AI startups around the world with teams of 50 employees or fewer, according to PitchBook data.
