Reid Hoffman: 15 people with AI can compete with 150 without it

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman wrote on LinkedIn that "15 people with AI can compete with 150 without it," and made the same point on the "Possible" podcast that aired Wednesday.

Hoffman said AI "fundamentally changes what small teams can accomplish," arguing small teams have clearer shared context and AI can build systems that capture and surface patterns across that context.

He advised startups to treat AI as an experiment rather than trying to find existing products to roll out, saying AI-native teams ask, "What would the perfect solution look like for my exact situation?" and then build it, "even if crude."

On the podcast, Hoffman and AI engineer Parth Patil described using a combination of Codex and Claude Code to create a French translator for the show and to test localization; Patil said Codex offered an option to enable translation pipelines for 68 other languages.

Hoffman said the translation example showed something that was previously "a massive stretch — maybe too expensive to do" becoming easy to prototype, and called it "the era of the tiny team." Others have made similar observations: Steven Bartlett said translations transformed his podcast at Davos in January, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has said AI is enabling individuals to do the work of entire teams on the companys most recent earnings call.

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