The Tiny Teams Playbook
Universal advice from 7 teams w/ 100 people & 200m ARR. manually summarized.
Hiring
• Hire right or not at all: have to be excited about the candidate or it’s a no
• Work Trials: paid projects for 4days-3months to be sure it’s a good fit
• Product-Led Hiring: top customers who quit their jobs to join you
• Top of market salaries: 95th+ percentile salaries
• Small (<15) crew of senior generalists: much fewer juniors
Culture & Value: keep a living culture deck and live it
• Low ego, high trust: trust = speed, ownership
• Independence, Grit & Resilience: ignore standard VC advice, persevere
• Radical transparency and accountability: wall of work, show & tells
• User focus: Work closely with users, celebrate them, delight in feedback
• Camaraderie, speed: Have fun, do retreats, avoid burnout
Operations
• Almost no meetings: “deep focus” - building instead of talking about building
• I Chief of Staff: automate research, marketing etc w/ Gumloop or Lindy
• AI Support: very well fleshed out at this point. e.g. see Parahelp and Railway
• Let Fires Burn: in order to prioritize on the 10% critically important
• Compound learning: Oleve phrases it “Don’t Learn It Twice” - build reusable templates and playbooks
• In Person: either have an office, or VERY frequent AirBnB hack weeks
Tech and Product
• Simple, Boring Tech Stack: shell scripts over k8s, keep code modular.
• Simple Product: start from UI wrapper over one API call to a LLM.
• Feature Flags/Experimentation: one of Oleve’s core principles.
• Benchmarks: create top tier internal evals for LLMs/harnesses. Market them.
Эти принципы они вывели из общения с 7 фаундерами стартапов, где вот такие микро-команды. Это 7 выпусков подкастов. Но, как всегда, вам не надо слушать все эти подкасты — ведь я сделал из них одно аудио-саммари на 15 минут.
→ https://www.latent.space/p/tiny