THE FALSE GOD OF HEADCOUNT It’s funny how lately I keep getting asked how big my team is, almost like it’s a badge of honor. If you’re not hiring people, are you even serious? I used to run a digital studio. We got acquired in 2022 and at our peak we were around 40 people, tackling 8-figure projects for some of the largest brands and institutions in the world. Not a gigantic company by any means, but big enough that I know what scaling a team actually means. And even with incredibly talented people and a proper management layer, SO much of my time went into delegating, managing, hiring, keeping people happy, making sure they didn’t burn out, replacing them when they eventually left, staffing up when a big project came in, figuring out what everyone would work on when it ended… It never stops. Staying hands-on was always incredibly important to me. I felt that the second I stopped actually making things, I would slowly become irrelevant at the thing I was supposed to lead. So I stayed hands-on. Mostly at night and on weekends. 😅 There’s this weird idea, especially in corporate America, that progress means managing more people. Bigger title, bigger salary, bigger team. Except nobody really tells you that 1/ not everyone is cut out to be a manager and 2/ the more you manage, the more you inevitably have to let go of actually doing. Fast forward to this week. I wrapped a 16-minute, feature-quality episode of Junkyard King, with the help of one person getting through some of the shots. I worked on a tool to automate part of my storyboarding process. And I built a working beta of a Junkyard King arcade game that would probably have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of development through a more traditional path. Is all of it perfect? Of course not. But it exists. And that’s what I find so liberating about agents right now. It’s not even just about doing more with fewer people. It’s about being able to find out whether an idea is worth burning more money and resources on before burning the money and resources on it. I can build the thing. Play with it. Break it. Decide it sucks. Throw it away. Or realize there’s something there and THEN bring in the right people to take it further. I’ve been on both sides of this and I absolutely still believe in people. I want talented people around me. Some things I simply cannot do, and some things become infinitely better when the right person touches them. But I want the right people, for the right tasks, at the right moment. What I reject is this lingering idea that having a payroll somehow proves you’re doing serious work. That hiring is progress. That 20 people building something is inherently more impressive than 2 people building the same thing. Maybe my lingering ADHD is finally having its moment 😂 but being able to stay hands-on, jump between disciplines and actually MAKE things again has been incredibly liberating. I don’t want to look like I’m building. I want to build. And I think our obsession with headcount shows how far we still are from understanding what the technology developing in front of us is actually going to change.