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Smaller Is Better in Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Moment

As artificial intelligence takes on more and more tasks, tech executives are embracing teams as small as two: one person plus A.I. In many industries, leading a big team is a flex. A large head...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.03.28 18:02 0

Smaller Is Better in Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Moment

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Smaller Is Better in Silicon Valley’s ‘Tiny Team’ Moment

As artificial intelligence takes on more and more tasks, tech executives are embracing teams as small as two: one person plus A.I.

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Melanie Lambrick

Lora Kelley

March 28, 2026,

5:01 a.m. ET

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In many industries, leading a big team is a flex. A large head count implies a large budget, and suggests that your organization is powerful and making things happen. But lately, in the world of start-ups, some founders have been bragging about doing more with fewer people.

Silicon Valley has embraced “

tiny teams

,” celebrating high revenue-to-worker ratios and groups of “high agency” employees, who each get plenty done with artificial intelligence. A

site

billing itself as the “tiny teams hall of fame,” a directory of such companies, has garnered some

media attention

. Dan Shipper, who runs the media start-up Every, recently coined a spinoff term on the phenomenon — the “

two-slice team

,” consisting of just one person plus A.I. tools.

The idea borrows from Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule,” his notion from two decades ago that teams at Amazon should not be so large that they require more than two pies of pizza. Now, Mr. Shipper argues that only two

slices

of pizza are needed. The person can eat them both; the A.I. agent doesn’t get hungry.

How it’s pronounced

/tī-nē tēm/

“One person can now do so much more” than in the past, Mr. Shipper said in an interview. At his start-up, several products — including an A.I. writing tool and an A.I. file organizer — are each managed by one employee (who can call in for help from colleagues across the organization as needed). This approach, he argues, enables his small, early-stage start-up to build various products in a way that “used to only be available to really big companies with huge budgets.”

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