The Real AI Opportunity is Finding Your Role in a 3-Person Company
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei don’t agree on much when it comes to AI’s future. But here’s one prediction they both share: AI will enable the first single-person company to reach a billion-dollar valuation (here are Altman and Amodei making the prediction).
It’s a bold claim that’s become part of the growing chorus of AI predictions, right alongside “AI will replace all entry-level jobs” and “AI will replace all knowledge workers.”
But what if the more practical opportunity isn’t the solo genius building a billion-dollar empire from their bedroom, and instead it’s the 3-person team that can accomplish what used to require 30, 100, or even thousands of people? Unlike the mythical 1-person unicorn company AI CEOs are predicting, my guess is that this 3-person version is spinning up all over the U.S. right now, and what’s even more exciting is that it’s a version you could be a part of.
Why Three People, Not One?
I’ve been more or less testing this question with my nonprofit MyNextPlay.org, and here’s what I’ve learned: trying to do it all solo, even with AI, is complex and exhausting. The cognitive load of switching between product development, business operations, and go-to-market execution is mind numbing. In fact, I question whether the human brain is even capable biologically of toggling across these three domains, let alone being able to expertly process all of the sub-topics that live within each area.
Anyone spending meaningful time with AI today knows how fatiguing it can be — all that prompting and re-prompting, instructing and correcting, just to get the work done the way you need it.
AI extends what one person can do, no doubt. But there’s real value in having actual humans in complementary roles. Three people who are each expert in one domain, using AI to 10x their individual capacity, will outperform one person trying to horizontally cover the entire org chart even with an army of AI agents at work.
At least right now (and maybe this is the overly optimistic belief I hold), expertise still matters. AI agents can do a lot, but they too often make assumptions that are wrong, drift into excessive complexity, can’t hold onto memory that is needed for future context, pursue strategies that fail, iterate and repeat attempts that don’t work the first time, and are apt to make recommendations that if actually implemented could sink what you’re building. Human judgment, built from real experience and domain knowledge is required to catch those mistakes before they become problems.
Basically, AI keeps you active, moving forward, and expanding the scope of what you can work on, but it doesn’t efficiently and consistently yield the best results.
What the 3-Person Company Actually Looks Like
Here’s a potential model: three core functions, each led by one person with domain expertise who uses AI to expand their scope and therefore the organization’s capabilities:
Product Development Lead — This person owns the product vision, writes the product brief and requirements with an AI agent’s assistance, manages the development, testing, and deployment process in GitHub, and builds releases from MVP to production-ready using AI coding agents like Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or the like. They’re shipping and iterating with users, using AI to do work that used to require multiple engineers and designers.
Business Operations Lead — Your Swiss Army knife for everything that keeps a company running. They build the operating model, manage finances and fundraising, handle incorporation and legal agreements, set up people systems. With AI helping them automate financial reporting, draft contracts, and manage compliance, one person can genuinely handle what used to be a full finance, people, and business ops team.
Go-to-Market Lead — This person builds your customer acquisition channels, runs marketing campaigns, handles sales conversations, and manages customer success across your existing customers. AI helps them create content, analyze campaign performance, personalize outreach at scale, and track customer health metrics. They’re your entire revenue engine and they employ agents to ensure key metrics like customer acquisition cost and lifetime customer value are optimized.
Each “lead” focuses on deploying agentic AI to fully develop the breadth of what their functional area must execute, and through collaboration with AI they continue to leverage their specific expertise to scale what the organization can achieve. And most important, they collaborate with each other to ensure that AI agents fully collaborate across the organization and to bring human judgment to the strategic decisions that AI can’t fully make.
What This Means for Your Career Right Now
If this is where things are heading (and I think it is) then one distinct piece of career advice becomes pretty obvious.
Don’t try to be an expert at everything. Pick one of these three domains and become excellent at it. Are you the person who loves building products and can translate user needs into features that ship? Are you the systems thinker who can architect how a business operates, generates revenue, and should allocate capital? Are you part storyteller, part analyst, i.e. someone who can both engage audiences and convert them into growing customer bases, then turn your most avid customers into advocates?
The opportunity isn’t to shoot for the glory of becoming a solo founder who does it all. It’s becoming so good at one critical function that you’re the person someone wants as their product lead, their business ops lead, or their GTM lead when they’re ready to build something with you.
So here’s your next challenge:
Identify the functional area that you would take the “lead” role in
Find two other people who are each expert in one of the other two functional areas
Go build a company or organization with these other two people that solves an important problem
And hey, if the above sounds like too much to take on right now, then just keep working on #1 above, and keep your eyes open to find people who check the box for #2. Once these two steps are in place you’re on your way to step #3 before you know it.
NextPlay>Forward AI Disclaimer: I very actively use artificial intelligence and large language models to generate the content you read here, but I do review it and edit it to make sure it can be generally useful to people who read it. Keep in mind that AI can make mistakes - check important information. Let me know if I make any errors and I will correct them.