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Every few weeks, another AI company posts a revenue chart that goes almost straight up. Lovable crossed a $600 million revenue run rate in September 2026, up from $500 million in June. Cursor passed $4 billion in annualized revenue in early June 2026, double where it stood in February. Three years ago, those numbers would have sounded made up.

Founders outside AI feel these charts. A fintech team waiting on a license starts to feel slow. A payments company growing 6% a month starts calling it a plateau. Plans get reset around a tempo that was never theirs.

The decisions that follow are usually bad ones. They hire ahead of demand, raise on terms they can’t grow into or walk away from a market right before it turns.

AI’s speed has specific causes

The AI coding tools grew fast for reasons that don’t transfer. The product lives in a browser tab. A user pays with a credit card, so there’s no procurement cycle. No regulator signs off. The buyer already understands the job, which is building software, and sees a result in minutes. Every new model release makes the product better before the startup ships anything.

Remove those conditions, and the curve flattens. Most sectors carry at least two brakes: a long sales cycle, a regulator, a customer who needs educating or a physical supply chain. Copy the pace of a company with none of those brakes, and you’ll burn 18 months of runway in nine.

Other categories, other clocks

Fintech runs on regulatory time. Revolut, founded in 2015, spent close to two years in the UK on a restricted banking license with a cap on deposits. It only launched as a full UK bank in March 2026, with 13 million UK customers already on the app. One of the fastest-growing companies in Europe still had to wait for a regulator to say yes.

Singapore’s digital banks show the same pattern closer to home. Trust Bank recorded its first profitable month in March 2026, just over three years after launch. GXS Bank, backed by Grab and Singtel, lost S$132 million in FY2025, the largest loss among the city’s digital banks. Same market, very different curves, and both still early.

A bank has to win deposits, build a loan book and prove credit quality across a full cycle before the economics work. None of that compresses because a competitor in another sector shipped faster. Speed shows up later, once trust and the balance sheet are in place.

Trust Bank’s CEO described the March result as the outcome of years of disciplined execution. That’s what the right clock looks like from the inside: long stretches of unglamorous work, then a month where the numbers turn.

Map your category’s curve

Founders tend to benchmark against whoever is loudest that quarter. A better benchmark is the companies that went through your category before you. Pick three. Find out how many years each took to reach its first $1 million in revenue, its first institutional round and its first profitable year. Most of this is public in IPO filings, funding announcements and founder interviews.

Then look at what controls speed in your market. How long between first meeting and signed contract? Who else has to say yes: a regulator, a compliance team, a bank partner? How often does the buyer make this decision? A company selling into annual budgets gets one real shot per customer per year. That’s your clock, and your plan should run on it.

This changes the investor conversation, too. If a fintech board expects AI-style growth, someone will be disappointed around month 14. Put the category curve in front of them early, with the comparables, so you’re measured against the right line.

Staying motivated on a long curve

Long curves are hard on morale. The visible milestones sit far apart. When your feed is full of eight-month success stories, the gap between your effort and your progress starts to feel personal.

The fix is to shorten the feedback loop without pretending the curve is shorter. Pick two or three numbers your team controls and can move inside a week: discovery calls booked, day-30 cohort retention, time from signup to first value. Review them every Monday. When those move, you’re making real progress, even if revenue moves at the speed of your category.

It also helps to name the bend. Every long curve has a point where it steepens: a license granted, a distribution deal signed, a cost threshold crossed. Write down what yours is and how you’d know you’re getting close. A team that knows what it’s waiting for can wait a long time. A team that’s just waiting tends to quit.

The next time an AI revenue chart crosses your feed, count how many of its conditions you share before you let it touch your plan. If the answer is zero, close the tab and get back to your own curve.

Every few weeks, another AI company posts a revenue chart that goes almost straight up. Lovable crossed a $600 million revenue run rate in September 2026, up from $500 million in June. Cursor passed $4 billion in annualized revenue in early June 2026, double where it stood in February. Three years ago, those numbers would have sounded made up.

Founders outside AI feel these charts. A fintech team waiting on a license starts to feel slow. A payments company growing 6% a month starts calling it a plateau. Plans get reset around a tempo that was never theirs.

The decisions that follow are usually bad ones. They hire ahead of demand, raise on terms they can’t grow into or walk away from a market right before it turns.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Ronneil Ramlal, a 38-year-old entrepreneur based in Ontario, Canada. Ramlal is the founder and CEO of Protein Chefs, a gourmet and health-focused meal delivery service. He started Protein Chefs as a side hustle while working as a supervisor at United Parcel Service (UPS), then left that role to focus on the business in 2017. 

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I started Protein Chefs in 2015 with my wife, Yuvika Wadhwa. I was always passionate about starting a business because I grew up watching my father, who is an entrepreneur. My wife was a pastry chef, and we met at the gym. Since we both are serious about our fitness, and with our respective backgrounds in business and hospitality, the food industry was naturally appealing to us. We specifically chose the prepared meal delivery business because in 2015, with our busy corporate jobs, we struggled to meal prep every week and couldn’t find healthful meal delivery options. We wanted to eat balanced, nutritious food that was also flavorful. 

Bootstrapping the side hustle with $2,500

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money did it take to launch?
I didn’t want to borrow money, so we completely bootstrapped the business. I used $2,500 from my savings to get a website developed, hire a chef on an hourly basis and rent a kitchen space. Then, we set up an Instagram account and started posting about the business and gradually getting followers. Next, we reached out to fitness influencers because initially we struggled to get orders. We cold-messaged people on Instagram who might want free meals in exchange for a review of our service. That’s how we got our first few customers.

Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business?
The only “resource” I turned to when I needed help to brainstorm ideas or discuss challenges was my dad. The first person I turned to was my wife because we made all decisions about the business together.

Invest early on in marketing, a website and SEO

If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach, and how do you wish you’d done it differently?
I would invest early on in marketing, especially in building a better website and SEO. At the time, we were so focused on running kitchen operations that we could barely afford to peep outside. This led to slow growth for the first few years. I wish I had invested more in automating some manual tasks such as customer database management and sending them email reminders to order meals, so I could free up more time for myself. I would have definitely spent more on marketing because that allowed us to hone in on our target audience of busy professionals who want to eat healthfully and update our messaging accordingly.       

The value in customer service and transparency

When it comes to this specific business, what is something you’ve found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but likely aren’t?
The food industry has multiple moving parts such as kitchen operations, packaging, delivery, customer service, partnerships, supplier management, marketing, website and so on. People in this business should be prepared to handle all these areas in unison and simultaneously for the business to be successful.

If your food is great, but no one knows about you, and your customer service doesn’t support your customers, it doesn’t matter how much time and effort you’re spending in the kitchen. If your website is avant garde, and your branding is on point but your meals aren’t what you promised they would be, you won’t get customers to stay. In today’s market, it’s easy to believe that a product can ride on a great social media or personal brand, but that’s a short-sighted strategy. For everything to work, you must be willing to get involved in everything.

Second, when it comes to food, people are especially cautious about how their food is prepared, so if you can show complete transparency about your behind-the-scenes operations, that can help build credibility. For example, when we started showing our chef creating meals from scratch on our social media and the standards that we adhere to, our customers’ trust grew. So, before entering this industry, you must be prepared not to cut corners.

Another challenge in the food industry is that margins are thin when you only have a few customers. Profits expand once you reach high-volume production and build credibility, which can take a few years. You need a lot of patience.

The importance of hiring the right people

Can you recall a specific instance when something went very wrong — how did you fix it?
The biggest mistake we made was early on hiring a chef who didn’t fully comprehend the role. He was a really skilled cook but not a chef. He made very flavorful food, but he couldn’t do costing, standardize the menu, manage inventory or oversee a team. When we grew our customer base and added more employees into the kitchen, he couldn’t delegate or train. That fell to me and Yuvika, and it held us back for a few years. But that’s what we could afford at the time, and his flexible schedule worked for us. 

After about three or four years, we realized we weren’t growing, so we had to let him go and find someone more advanced. The next chef was a big step up. He standardized the menu, which let us add more dishes and meal plans. We had a few more chefs after that. Now we have a chef who is adept at everything: cooking, team management, menu innovation and development, paperwork and supplier management. It took some years to get here, but we learned how important it is to hire the right people for the job.

From $4,000 to $30,000 in monthly revenue — then 7 figures a year

How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
We struggled to get clients for the first weeks, but once that picked up, we had consistent revenue even initially, just not very high. At the beginning, it was around $4,000 monthly, which grew to $20,000 to $30,000 per month in the next few years.

What does growth and revenue look like now?
We plateaued for the first three to four years. After we invested more heavily in marketing and identified our main target audience as busy professionals and not only bodybuilders or fitness enthusiasts, our revenue doubled. Last year, we had 21% revenue growth, and this year, we’re at 30% growth, including our corporate partnerships. We reached seven-figure revenue in 2022 and have continued to maintain that. 

Take risks to see what’s possible

What do you enjoy most about running this business?
For me, it’s the unknown. I like not knowing what the next day could look like because that challenge gets me excited and allows me to push my own limits. There are no caps on what you could achieve, which can be good and bad because the success or failure of the business depends on you. I choose to see it as a vehicle for growth.

What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
When things get tough, know that it’s your job to vouch for yourself because no one else is going to do it for you. Stop comparing yourself to others, and continue to believe in yourself no matter how long it takes to see the result you were hoping for. Also, take measured risks. 

So, my advice is to be abundant when it comes to believing in yourself and calculated when it comes to taking a risk, but nonetheless, take risks, because that’s the only way to know what’s possible.

This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Ronneil Ramlal, a 38-year-old entrepreneur based in Ontario, Canada. Ramlal is the founder and CEO of Protein Chefs, a gourmet and health-focused meal delivery service. He started Protein Chefs as a side hustle while working as a supervisor at United Parcel Service (UPS), then left that role to focus on the business in 2017. 

When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I started Protein Chefs in 2015 with my wife, Yuvika Wadhwa. I was always passionate about starting a business because I grew up watching my father, who is an entrepreneur. My wife was a pastry chef, and we met at the gym. Since we both are serious about our fitness, and with our respective backgrounds in business and hospitality, the food industry was naturally appealing to us. We specifically chose the prepared meal delivery business because in 2015, with our busy corporate jobs, we struggled to meal prep every week and couldn’t find healthful meal delivery options. We wanted to eat balanced, nutritious food that was also flavorful. 

Bootstrapping the side hustle with $2,500

What were some of the first steps you took to get your side hustle off the ground? How much money did it take to launch?
I didn’t want to borrow money, so we completely bootstrapped the business. I used $2,500 from my savings to get a website developed, hire a chef on an hourly basis and rent a kitchen space. Then, we set up an Instagram account and started posting about the business and gradually getting followers. Next, we reached out to fitness influencers because initially we struggled to get orders. We cold-messaged people on Instagram who might want free meals in exchange for a review of our service. That’s how we got our first few customers.

You never forget your first big win in business. Mine came in the form of my first victory over my older brother in Monopoly. The game turned 90 last year, and it remains one of the greatest, most ubiquitous and supremely frustrating games of all time. For nearly a century, Monopoly has taught all of us ages 8 and up how to think about money.

Buy properties. Collect rent. Build houses. Accumulate wealth. Bankrupt your competitors. It’s one of the most successful board games ever created because its rules are simple and its objective is clear: Own the most, and you win. The problem is that many entrepreneurs carry those same rules into business.

Real business doesn’t reward the person who acquires the most assets. It rewards the leader who consistently makes better decisions. Success isn’t determined by a single big move. It’s shaped by thousands of small decisions that compound over time. Ironically, Monopoly hints at this from the start. Every player rolls the same dice, and no one controls the outcome. What separates players isn’t the roll. It’s what they do next.

Business works the same way. Markets shift. Customers leave. New competitors emerge. Economic conditions change. You don’t control those events, but you do control your response. After working with thousands of business owners, I’ve found that the entrepreneurs who consistently outperform their peers share three habits.

1. Know the board before you roll

My first sweet Monopoly victory over my brother came after I learned two invaluable lessons: Whoever controls the bank controls the game, and my brother cheats at board games. Everyone remembers the anticipation of rolling the dice. A lucky roll lands you on an unowned property. An unlucky one checks you into a competitor’s luxury hotel.

But the game was designed long before you picked up the dice. The spaces have different values. Some properties are easier to build on. Some cost more to own. The odds of landing on each space can be calculated. Luck matters, but statistics shape the game before your turn begins.

In business, one of your biggest decisions happens before you open the doors: choosing which game to play. Every industry comes with a built-in financial structure. A hospitality business may carry significant facilities, labor and inventory costs before the first customer walks in. A professional services firm can start with far less overhead. Both can become great businesses, but they start from very different places on the board.

That’s why controlling the bank, or knowing exactly where every dollar goes, matters so much. With clients, I build a financial scorecard using what I call TAPs, or target allocation percentages. Instead of looking only at whether revenue went up or down, I want to know how every dollar is being allocated:

• What percentage of revenue goes to labor?
• How much is tied up in inventory?
• What are you spending on facilities?
• What should those percentages be for a healthy company in your industry?

Those targets give you something better than a gut feeling. They tell you whether the business is behaving the way you expected. If labor is supposed to consume 35% of revenue and you’re consistently running at 50%, that’s a signal. If facility costs eat up a larger share of revenue every quarter, you have reason to investigate before the problem becomes a cash crisis.

The economy will still shift. A key employee may resign. A competitor may enter your market. New technology may change what customers expect. Those are the dice rolls you can’t control. The founders who outperform their peers don’t make decisions based on hope or instinct. They make them based on data. Before your next major investment, ask:

• What does the data say?
• Which assumptions are facts, and which are opinions?
• If I removed emotion from this decision, would I make the same choice?

Every entrepreneur gets lucky. Sustainable businesses are built by leaders who know what to do after the dice stop rolling.

2. Don’t buy every property

One of the first lessons Monopoly seems to teach is simple: If you land on an available property, buy it. In business, that strategy gets expensive.

You don’t need to offer the market every product or service it might buy from you. You need to understand your core competencies and become exceptionally good where you have the strongest advantage.

I learned a version of this playing Monopoly with my family. I noticed that people kept landing on the orange properties: St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue and New York Avenue. So I started targeting them every game. Instead of trying to own everything on the board, I focused my attention and cash on getting those properties. I started winning a lot more.

Years later, when I discovered game theory, I understood why. The orange properties sit just beyond Jail, and Monopoly has several ways of sending players there. When they leave, the odds created by two dice make certain rolls more likely than others. The board’s design makes those orange spaces especially valuable. I hadn’t stumbled onto a trick. I had identified where the opportunity was concentrated.

Entrepreneurs need the same discipline. Every new customer segment, service, location or acquisition competes for your attention, your team’s capacity and your cash. Just because you can sell something doesn’t mean your company should. Growth adds complexity, and complexity is where many businesses hit a breaking point. The goal is to know which opportunities deserve your resources and which ones pull you away from the business you’re best equipped to build.

Before you buy the next “property,” ask:

• Does this strengthen our core business, and do we have a real advantage here?
• Are our systems ready for this level of growth?
• What will we stop doing to make room for it?

The best Monopoly players don’t need every property on the board. They need the right ones.

3. Passing GO isn’t the same as winning

Everyone loves collecting $200. It’s a reward, but it’s temporary.

In business, revenue feels like passing GO. It’s exciting. It builds momentum. It validates your hard work. But if all you measure is how much the business brings in each month or how much you take home at year’s end, you’re missing a much bigger part of the game. Business isn’t just an income game. It’s an asset game.

You didn’t take the risk of becoming an entrepreneur to build yourself another job. You’re building something that should grow more valuable over time. A healthy business produces income today while becoming an asset that can operate beyond its founder, generate cash flow and hold value for someone other than the person who started it.

That’s why revenue alone can mislead. I’ve met entrepreneurs running multimillion-dollar companies who still have to show up every day for the business to function. If they stop working, decisions stop getting made, customers stop getting served and revenue starts disappearing. They’ve created a great income, but they haven’t finished building the asset.

The shift happens when you focus on what the business does with the money after it passes GO. Healthy businesses convert revenue into cash flow, invest that cash wisely, strengthen their systems and build value that compounds over time.

At the end of every month, ask:

• Where did our cash actually go?
• Which customers and investments produced the best returns?
• What did we build this month that made the company more valuable?

Collecting revenue is satisfying. Building an asset is how entrepreneurship creates lasting wealth.

The die is cast

Monopoly ends when one player accumulates enough assets to bankrupt everyone else. Your goal in business shouldn’t be to eliminate competitors. It should be to build a company that creates value year after year, adapts as conditions change and makes better decisions than it did the year before.

Monopoly has lasted 90 years because it’s a brilliant game. Just remember that building a business requires a different set of rules. Everyone loves a good roll, but you’ll be remembered for the decisions you make when the dice don’t fall your way.

You never forget your first big win in business. Mine came in the form of my first victory over my older brother in Monopoly. The game turned 90 last year, and it remains one of the greatest, most ubiquitous and supremely frustrating games of all time. For nearly a century, Monopoly has taught all of us ages 8 and up how to think about money.

Buy properties. Collect rent. Build houses. Accumulate wealth. Bankrupt your competitors. It’s one of the most successful board games ever created because its rules are simple and its objective is clear: Own the most, and you win. The problem is that many entrepreneurs carry those same rules into business.

Real business doesn’t reward the person who acquires the most assets. It rewards the leader who consistently makes better decisions. Success isn’t determined by a single big move. It’s shaped by thousands of small decisions that compound over time. Ironically, Monopoly hints at this from the start. Every player rolls the same dice, and no one controls the outcome. What separates players isn’t the roll. It’s what they do next.

For Hunter Taylor, the story of Mabē goes back “to the very beginning of time.” In other words, it starts in fourth grade when he met Allie Taylor for the first time. 

“I was always in love with Allie,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I just knew that she was my soulmate, that we could do anything together that we put our minds to — I felt like we could tackle the world together.”

The childhood sweethearts got married and, in 2022, became first-time parents. They quickly found a glaring gap in the market for baby carriers. 

Allie was the first to notice the problem. She had trouble finding a carrier that was both functional and fashionable at an accessible price point. 

She mentioned it to Hunter several times, and he finally went looking for baby carriers himself. He quickly found that there was a gap in the market in terms of price point, aesthetics and messaging components. He also couldn’t find a product that checked all three boxes.

“I just remember in that moment feeling so convicted that we were the right people to do this,” Hunter says.

They were set on writing a different story for new moms

By early 2023, the two agreed that they wanted to create a premium baby carrier. Allie also saw an opportunity to reshape the conversation around what it meant to be a new mom. They decided to call their brand Mabē (pronounced maybe), and their brand name and logo are inspired by the monarch butterfly. 

“Our mission is simple: Provide a baby carrier that looks and feels incredible,” Allie wrote in a September 2023 Instagram post. “One that empowers you to continue doing everything you love, so you can keep chasing your dreams (whatever they mabē) with your hands free, and your baby in tow.”

Her desire to start the brand was also personal: She tells Entrepreneur she remembers feeling “really overwhelmed” as a new mom.

“I felt like everyone was just telling me that I’m gonna lose myself now that I’m a mom,” Allie says. “I was determined to write a different story, and I wanted to continue being who I was as a person in addition to being a mom.”

Carrying her baby changed the game

Allie says that carrying her baby in a carrier was “the ticket” or the “unlock” for her to have the confidence to do the things she used to do. Instead of having to worry about carrying around a car seat or a stroller, she could simply carry her baby on her chest. 

“The confidence that I had from wearing my baby on my chest was just unmatched,” she says. “However, the carrier that I had was just not the cutest thing. As a new mom, you already are not always feeling your very best. Then you layer on ugly baby gear, and it doesn’t help you feel better about yourself.”

Creating the product

The Taylors believed in the product — enough so that they invested hundreds of thousands in personal savings to bootstrap the brand.

To start, they identified manufacturers already experienced in making baby carriers. From there, they went through a months-long sampling process, testing fabrics, adjusting design details and rejecting early versions.

“The first one we got was terrible,” Hunter says.

They continued working with manufacturers until they felt they had a version worth taking to market. The process moved relatively quickly: They came up with the idea in March 2023 and launched in November of that same year. The brand’s signature Monarch Carrier is designed to look more like a stylish accessory than utilitarian baby gear and is priced at around $129.

Talking to the mom

The product was central, but Mabē’s growth strategy also depended heavily on Allie’s ability to create a brand voice that stood apart from traditional baby-product marketing. She focused on a customer’s identity and aspirations. 

“I acted like a big brand from the very beginning, even though it was just me behind my phone doing all of the posting,” she says.

In the early days, she tapped people in her hometown and small-business circle for help. A friend helped build the website. Another took the brand’s initial photography. She also built an Instagram account and an email list before launch.

Its marketing message was crafted to speak to mothers as individuals rather than as extensions of their babies. Allie says she regularly asks if a piece of content will resonate, help a customer see herself in it and make her feel something.

“Instead of saying something along the lines of, ‘Our carrier has three carry positions and is safety certified, and this is the fabric and this is all the different features of it,’” she says, “I’m talking to the mom and saying, ‘Look what you can do when you put this carrier on.’”

That could mean a stay-at-home parent moving more easily through the day or an entrepreneur building a side hustle with a baby on her chest. The product benefits still matter, but Allie sees them as secondary to the messaging.

“It’s like selling them who they can become and what’s possible if they believe in themselves and if they feel confident,” she says.

The messaging gained momentum. At the time of the interview, Mabē had 176,000 Instagram followers. The founders say social media and word-of-mouth drove initial demand. 

Selling out in a minute

Today, Mabē has grown into an eight-figure business in under three years, and its products recently landed at 1,700 Target stores. In 2026, the company is on pace to grow its revenue by more than 40% year-over-year. 

Mabē’s early rise with customers was also unusually fast. The founders disclosed that their first launch sold out within two hours. Later, shoppers kept asking for preorders, so they decided to test it for their third launch. 

Hunter remembers thousands of people waiting on Mabē’s website before the preorder began.

“Once we opened the preorder, orders started to roll in, and we sold out,” he says. 

The result was startling: Mabē sold thousands of carriers in under one minute, generating about $500,000 in revenue.

“We took all of that and put it back into production,” Hunter says. “That solved a lot of our cash flow problems without having to take outside funding.”

They chose to maintain quality — even at a loss

Fast growth also tested the company’s commitment to quality. During Mabē’s first Black Friday sale in 2024, the founders discovered that a batch of fabric did not have the texture and feel they wanted. The issue was not a safety concern, they say, but it fell short of the brand’s quality standards.

The company could have waited for customers to complain and replaced only the units connected to those complaints. Instead, it contacted affected customers proactively and sent replacement carriers to everyone at no cost.

The company replaced a few thousand products, a decision the founders estimate cost around $250,000.

For a young company coming off its biggest sales period, it was a difficult financial and logistical decision. But the Taylors viewed it as an investment in a long-term brand relationship rather than a short-term expense.

“The customer first,” Allie says. “It was always about the customer; it’s always about their satisfaction and making sure that we gave them the experience that they deserve.”

Hunter added that he never intended Mabē to be “a short-term sort of cash grab.”

“We want to build a dedicated business to make people feel empowered with the product and the brand that we’re building,” he says.

For Hunter Taylor, the story of Mabē goes back “to the very beginning of time.” In other words, it starts in fourth grade when he met Allie Taylor for the first time. 

“I was always in love with Allie,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I just knew that she was my soulmate, that we could do anything together that we put our minds to — I felt like we could tackle the world together.”

The childhood sweethearts got married and, in 2022, became first-time parents. They quickly found a glaring gap in the market for baby carriers. 

When I started Infragistics, I was used to solving problems myself. That was partly because I had to. We were a small company with limited resources and few people to hand things off to. If a task needed to get done, I did it. If a decision needed to be made, I made it. If something went wrong, I jumped in and fixed it.

Those instincts served me well and helped me build a company from a 10-person startup into a global organization with hundreds of employees across six countries. But eventually, they stopped serving me.

The bigger Infragistics became, the more I realized that being the person with all the answers was actually becoming a limitation. I couldn’t be in every meeting, make every decision or personally solve every problem. More importantly, if I kept doing those things, I was preventing other people from developing the judgment and confidence to do it themselves.

That was one of the hardest transitions of my career. I realized that the skills I had relied on to build the company were not necessarily the skills I needed to lead it. Over 35 years, I’ve had to rethink how I manage, how I develop people and how much control I’m willing to give up. I’ve learned that scaling a company requires a founder to make three fundamental shifts.

1. Stop being the only person with all the answers

Early-stage companies often revolve around the founder’s judgment, and there’s good reason for that. Founders are deeply involved in the product, the customers and the day-to-day business. Decisions get made quickly because they don’t have to travel through layers of approval, and that speed is often a real advantage when trying to get ahead of the competition.

But most founders are also, without realizing it, running a command-and-control organization. The leader sets the direction, makes the decisions and expects the team to execute. It works when the company is small enough to manage directly, but as the company grows, people stop bringing problems forward because they expect to be told what to do anyway. The organization becomes dependent on one person’s judgment at the exact moment it needs to be building more of it. And the founder who was once the engine of the company becomes the bottleneck. 

Eventually, a founder’s job is no longer to have the best answer, but to help other people develop the ability to find the best answer. That shift requires moving from command-and-control to coaching. Coaching isn’t about telling people what to do, but about helping people understand why a decision needs to be made and giving them the tools to make better decisions themselves. It builds judgment over time rather than substituting someone else’s. Done consistently, it creates a team that can operate, adapt and lead without the founder in the room.

2. Stop hiring people to execute and start hiring people who want to learn

Most hiring decisions focus on what someone can do right now. Can they handle the role? Do they have the relevant experience? Those are reasonable questions, but as a company grows, the answers become less obvious. Everything from markets and technology to customers can change drastically in the course of a year, and the skills that once made someone an excellent hire may not be the skills the company needs from them down the line. A team built entirely around execution, and around people who are very good at doing what they are told, will struggle to adapt when the ground shifts.

That’s why curiosity matters as much as capability. Leaders who build learning cultures start at the hiring stage. The questions worth asking in an interview are not just about what someone has done, but about how they think and whether they are actively invested in their own growth. 

Once those individuals are hired, the other half of the equation is investing in their curiosity. That means giving people a real budget for learning — conferences, courses, advanced degrees — and building development plans that take their growth seriously. 

A company cannot stay competitive by relying only on the knowledge it already has, and the founders who scale are the ones who hire for who someone can become, not just what they can do on day one. 

3. Give people enough trust to surprise you

Control feels safe, especially when the stakes are high. But a company can’t scale what only one person can manage, and at some point, the need for speed and the need for control become incompatible. 

Real delegation requires trust, and trust requires accepting that people will sometimes do things differently than you would. And while different can feel intimidating, it doesn’t mean the approach is worse. Founders who can’t tolerate change or a different way of thinking tend to pull decisions back toward themselves, which trains their teams to stop taking initiative and wait for direction. 

Building trust means giving people responsibility before it feels completely comfortable, letting them make decisions and resisting the urge to step in every time the approach differs from your own. At the end of the day it’s not about the path to a goal. What’s most important is that the goal is met. 

Trust is also cultivated when leaders model the behavior they want to see. If a leader can’t be challenged, no one else will feel comfortable challenging bad ideas. If a leader cannot admit mistakes, employees will learn to hide theirs. And if people do not feel safe disagreeing, the organization loses some of its best thinking.

The strange paradox of building a company is that the instincts that make a great founder are eventually the same ones that have to be unlearned. The founders who scale aren’t the ones who hold on to control the longest, but are the ones who build people who can think for themselves, create a culture that rewards curiosity and establish enough trust that the organization can make good decisions even when the founder isn’t in the room.

When I started Infragistics, I was used to solving problems myself. That was partly because I had to. We were a small company with limited resources and few people to hand things off to. If a task needed to get done, I did it. If a decision needed to be made, I made it. If something went wrong, I jumped in and fixed it.

Those instincts served me well and helped me build a company from a 10-person startup into a global organization with hundreds of employees across six countries. But eventually, they stopped serving me.

The bigger Infragistics became, the more I realized that being the person with all the answers was actually becoming a limitation. I couldn’t be in every meeting, make every decision or personally solve every problem. More importantly, if I kept doing those things, I was preventing other people from developing the judgment and confidence to do it themselves.

You know the competitor with three times your people and three times your budget. Sooner or later, that gap makes you wonder, “Do I have to hire the way they hire to keep up?”

Most of the time, you don’t.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC that companies are reaching as much as $10 million in revenue with teams of fewer than ten people. “You don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers,” he said. Base44, a bootstrapped app builder with eight employees, sold to Wix for $80 million six months after launch.

Small teams can win with an AI-first playbook

As the founder of a 20-person AI company with much bigger competitors, I believe AI can help small teams punch above their weight. But this doesn’t mean using AI for its own sake.

Instead, the best AI-native playbook involves validating AI performance data, holding AI accountable and using AI in ways that don’t bury humans in time-consuming new review tasks.

The strategies below require discipline rather than large teams or big budgets, and you can start them today.

Verify AI-reported performance data

Every AI tool gives you a dashboard of hours saved and output produced. I ignore those numbers because they measure volume. A rising volume line can mean progress or a growing pile of busywork.

When the code analytics firm GitClear studied 211 million changed lines of code, it found copy-pasted code exceeding refactored code for the first time in 2024 and tied the shift to AI coding assistants. More lines shipped, and more of them were duplicates someone will have to maintain.

Tracking how quickly you hit roadmap goals is a better way to assess AI’s impact. A feature slated for late in the third quarter that ships in mid-April has pulled you roughly 170 days forward. Log planned versus actual dates for your next three roadmap items, and keep ignoring the dashboard.

Build prototypes instead of lengthy feature documents

In my experience, the fastest agent-era teams spend more time deciding and less time documenting.

At my company, we used AI to eliminate lengthy proposal documents. When someone has a new idea, they use AI to prototype it fast. Then the team plays with it and makes a go/no-go decision in an hour. You can do this, too.

Write a one-page contract before an agent writes code

Once a feature is approved, we give the coding agent a lean, one-page document naming what the feature does, the data it touches, the interfaces it exposes and the ways it can fail.

A specific, well-written contract dramatically increases code quality and reduces your time-to-ship. A poorly written or missing contract slows you down: Auditing and fixing bad code costs more than the agent saved.

A 2025 Faros AI study of 10,000-plus developers found teams with high AI adoption completing 21% more tasks while code review time rose 91% and bug rates rose 9%.

Require the one-page contract this week for any agent-generated work.

Let automated gates and agents do preliminary reviews

The top frustration with AI tools in the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, named by 66 percent of developers, was solutions that are “almost right, but not quite.”

Most teams counter these buggy solutions by adding more human review at every stage. I think that instinct can be counterproductive.

Consistent automated testing, built as a series of deterministic gates, frees humans from the first line of review. That can mean requiring a compiler, type checker, linter and a full test suite in front of every merge, then letting agents attack each change like an adversary.

We do this at my company, and the result is cleaner code. My development team spends more time architecting tests and defining outcomes than combing through code. Make one gate non-negotiable, starting with your next merge.

Rank work by what it changed for users

AI made output cheap, and cheap output breaks scoreboards. Commits, tickets, drafts and decks inflate overnight while nothing changes for your customers.

I call this comfort work. It looks and feels productive but doesn’t advance any goal, and AI multiplies it because iterations are nearly free.

Attach a verifiable test to every goal that a stranger could check. “Checkout conversion crossed 4% and held for 30 days” is verifiable. Anyone can look it up. “Improved the funnel” is vague and can’t be validated.

Rank each project against these tests instead of by number of artifacts, and your team learns fast that shipping only counts when it affects a goal.

Use AI for your hardest decisions

The widest gap between a small team and a big one is how quickly they can make good decisions. Big teams have more data and expertise, so they more often choose the right path. Small teams can close the gap by using AI for decision support.

To get an unbiased answer and catch AI fabrications, ask several models the same question. Each has its own map of the world, so the places where they agree suggest a consensus.

Then have one model, or a skeptical teammate, try to discredit that consensus. Consensus tells you what’s popular. Verification tells you what’s true.

At my company, questions that once took a senior researcher a week now come back that morning. Run your next category bet or pricing call through this before the meeting that decides it. It is the throughline of what we’re building: as more buyers and their AI assistants ask whether they can trust a recommendation, the advantage goes to whoever can verify what the model only guesses at.

Discipline is the moat

A competitor with three times your people carries roughly nine times the coordination cost. Fred Brooks named the law a half-century ago in The Mythical Man-Month. “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

Every new hire coordinates with everyone already there, so working relationships multiply faster than headcount. Five people have 10 of them. A hundred have nearly 5,000.

Shopify runs hiring on this math. CEO Tobi Lütke told his teams to demonstrate why AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount.

The teams that rebuild around these six shifts win the decade. The ones that wait will spend it catching up to teams a third their size.

You know the competitor with three times your people and three times your budget. Sooner or later, that gap makes you wonder, “Do I have to hire the way they hire to keep up?”

Most of the time, you don’t.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC that companies are reaching as much as $10 million in revenue with teams of fewer than ten people. “You don’t need a team of 50 or 100 engineers,” he said. Base44, a bootstrapped app builder with eight employees, sold to Wix for $80 million six months after launch.

In the pursuit of greater productivity and profit, companies see AI as a glow on the horizon. For many workers, however, the AI revolution has already arrived in the form of a pink slip.

In January, Amazon announced nearly 16,000 job cuts to reduce organizational layers and bureaucracy. CEO Andy Jassy had previously predicted that generative AI and agents would mean fewer people doing some existing jobs. Meta soon followed with plans to eliminate about 8,000 positions, close to 10% of its workforce, in pursuit of greater efficiency while directing more resources toward AI. Financial technology company Block announced more than 4,000 cuts, nearly half of its workforce, as CEO Jack Dorsey explained that intelligence tools, combined with smaller and flatter teams, are changing how companies operate.

These tech heavyweights are hardly alone. Reuters has tracked AI-linked cuts or restructuring at companies ranging from Allianz and Nike to Telstra and British American Tobacco. In its monthly Challenger Report, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas attributed 7% of U.S. layoffs announced in January to AI. By the end of September, AI had been cited in more than 120,000 announced job cuts in 2026, about 21% of the total, making it the leading reason for layoffs so far this year.

Some of those workers will find another job or retire early. But if the data points to a trend, others may be turning lemons into lemonade through entrepreneurship.

Struck out? Strike out on your own

New business formation has been unusually strong this year, with nearly every month setting a record compared with the same month in previous years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, business formation statistics, nearly 4.2 million business applications were filed nationwide in the first eight months of 2026, up about 17% from the same period in 2025.

On their own, these numbers don’t prove that AI, layoffs or both are driving the surge. Business creation rises and falls for many reasons, as it did during the pandemic, and not every new registration becomes an operating company.

Still, the convergence turns heads. Even as large employers aim to accomplish more with smaller teams, backed by the muscle of AI, workers have access to many of the same productivity tools. In their hands, those tools offer a supercharged way to combine specialized knowledge, an idea for a product or service that solves a problem or fills a niche and a passion for bringing it to market.

Prepare for the AI-driven workplace

Not everyone affected by layoffs is being replaced by an AI agent. Companies cut jobs for many reasons, including industry pressures and narrowing margins. But AI is putting its thumb on the scale. Amazon, Meta and Block have all announced major reductions as they embrace AI, though each has described its role differently: Amazon emphasized cutting layers and bureaucracy, Meta pointed to shifting resources toward AI, and Block said AI-enabled productivity calls for a smaller workforce.

Rather than curse AI for eroding jobs, aspiring entrepreneurs should embrace what it can do for them. The same technology that helps a large corporation accomplish more with fewer employees can help a one-person venture tackle tasks that once required an entire team. AI can help research markets, develop business plans, create marketing materials, handle basic customer inquiries and automate routine administrative work.

When you’re getting a new business off the ground, every task you can handle without adding fixed payroll lowers the revenue your business needs to survive its lean years. Just as the internet and smartphones transformed business a generation ago, AI can transform yours.

Put your experience to work

A layoff can make years, or even decades, spent building a career at one company feel suddenly devalued. For a would-be entrepreneur, however, that hard-won experience may be the most valuable asset.

Let’s be honest: Employees know their industry’s problems because they’ve lived with them. They know what customers complain about, which processes waste time, which services cost too much and where existing products fall short. Unless you’re set on doing something completely different, like leaving a civil engineering job to open a scrapbooking shop, you have an opportunity to analyze those issues and, free of corporate baggage, create real solutions.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A specialized consulting practice, service business or niche product that addresses a problem you already understand may offer a natural, inexpensive path to entrepreneurship.

Use AI to lower the cost of launching

One of AI’s biggest benefits for new entrepreneurs is the ability to test an idea before making a major financial commitment. You may not need to lease an office, hire employees or buy expensive technology right away.

Start with a small, workable version of your idea. Interview potential customers. Build a basic website. Test different pricing structures and marketing offers. Use AI for research and routine work, but bring in human experts when needed. Spending doesn’t make you a successful entrepreneur — revenue does. And revenue validates a business idea better than a glitzy launch party or a wood-paneled office.

If you’re leaving salaried employment, protecting your personal cash matters too, even if you received a generous severance package. Add up your household expenses alongside your business costs, and know your full runway before taking on serious financial risk.

Keep it human

AI may be eliminating jobs — it may have eliminated yours. Entrepreneurs can use these tools to keep startup costs low, including labor costs. But don’t take that as a sign to cut people out of the picture.

The surge in new businesses may partly reflect corporate America devaluing human work and putting profits ahead of people. As layoffs continue to reshape the workforce, traditional employment may keep shrinking while the ranks of people who recognize the value of their own expertise grow.

Building a business means building a trustworthy brand, and that requires human interaction. AI can create content, analyze data and automate repetitive tasks, saving time and money. Where it falls short is in building person-to-person relationships. For entrepreneurs, AI’s role is to free you up to apply your expertise, judgment and creativity. After all, those uniquely human traits are what will help you connect with customers and establish your brand.

In the pursuit of greater productivity and profit, companies see AI as a glow on the horizon. For many workers, however, the AI revolution has already arrived in the form of a pink slip.

In January, Amazon announced nearly 16,000 job cuts to reduce organizational layers and bureaucracy. CEO Andy Jassy had previously predicted that generative AI and agents would mean fewer people doing some existing jobs. Meta soon followed with plans to eliminate about 8,000 positions, close to 10% of its workforce, in pursuit of greater efficiency while directing more resources toward AI. Financial technology company Block announced more than 4,000 cuts, nearly half of its workforce, as CEO Jack Dorsey explained that intelligence tools, combined with smaller and flatter teams, are changing how companies operate.

These tech heavyweights are hardly alone. Reuters has tracked AI-linked cuts or restructuring at companies ranging from Allianz and Nike to Telstra and British American Tobacco. In its monthly Challenger Report, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas attributed 7% of U.S. layoffs announced in January to AI. By the end of September, AI had been cited in more than 120,000 announced job cuts in 2026, about 21% of the total, making it the leading reason for layoffs so far this year.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.