On building small

There’s a kind of vanity in building big. Big team, big roadmap, big launch. Most of it is theater. A bigger thing rarely means more of the right thing — it usually means more of every kind of thing, including the wrong kind.

I keep coming back to the discipline of small. One module. One screen. One promise.

Both of the companies I’m working on right now could be technically bigger today. There’s a version of each that would look more impressive on a slide. Neither would be better.

Small forces honesty. You can’t hide a wrong assumption behind scale. You can’t comfort yourself with vanity metrics that fall apart under inspection. You don’t get to say “we’ll fix it when we have product-market fit,” because every interaction is the one telling you whether you do.

It’s also lonelier. No team buzz, no fundraising oxygen, no narrative momentum. Some weeks the loneliness feels like discipline. Some weeks it feels like delusion.

I think the trick — and I think it’s a trick — is to make the smallness deliberate. Pick the constraints, name them, and live inside them on purpose. Small because the few people actually using the thing are the right people to listen to, not because they’re all you have.

Tuesday in Doha. Back to it.