Two people. About $400 million in revenue their first year. On pace for close to $2 billion in their second.
The company is called Medvi. Two brothers, running the whole thing on AI.
Their competitor is Hims & Hers. Founded in 2017. Over 2,000 employees. Around $2 billion in revenue. It took them the better part of a decade to get there.
Two brothers are about to do in two years what two thousand people needed the better part of a decade for.
Read that again. Not the part where you feel behind. The part underneath it that almost nobody is naming. The math moved. How big you could get used to be decided by how many people you could hire, train, pay, and keep from quitting on you. That was the whole game. That number is gone. Most owners are still running like it isn’t.
Ted told a story on the show this week that made the whole thing land for me. Sam Zemurray. The banana man.
Showed up in this country broke. A Jewish immigrant from Russia with nothing in his pockets. Died one of the richest men in the world. Selling bananas.
Here’s how. The big player, United Fruit, ran the ports, and they threw out the ripe ones. The bananas with a few spots, because those only had three to five days of life left in them. Everybody looked at those and saw garbage. Zemurray looked at them and saw a door nobody was guarding. He could get those bananas to market inside three to five days if he just moved faster than a company that size knew how to move. So he did. He bought the trash nobody wanted and he beat the giant at the one thing a giant can never do.
He moved fast. He ended up owning United Fruit.
That’s the whole story of right now. Your edge over the thousand-person company was never going to be money. It was never talent or reach. It’s that you can move and they can’t.
So ask the question almost nobody asks inside their own walls: what is actually slowing the big guy down?
It’s not the work. It’s everything that happens around the work.
I got into a company recently. Real access, all the way into their project management software. I pulled the data and added it up, and the team was burning more than forty hours a week on pure coordination. Forty hours. A full human being’s week, gone. Not building anything. Just telling each other what to do, waiting on the next person, updating the board, sitting in meetings that should have been one message. Nobody ever totals it up, because it hides in fifteen-minute slices across everybody’s calendar. So it just looks like work.
That right there is what kills the org chart.
We built companies around hierarchy for one reason. People need to know who to ask. Who’s in charge of this. Who’s the expert on that. Okay, now we need a meeting. Every one of those questions has a cost, and the org chart exists to manage it. Now put agents underneath the work and watch what happens to that cost. The handoff is instant. The thing that used to wait six hours for somebody to get back from lunch doesn’t wait. The whole structure we built to move information between humans stops earning its keep.
A guy named Diamandis and his crew put it the cleanest I’ve heard it on their show: organizations are moving from hierarchy to intelligence. The org chart isn’t getting flatter. It’s dying.
If you’re running something between half a million and five million, here’s where this actually touches you. Three things.
One. The leverage was never the AI. It’s you.
I talked to a guy last week who swears his AI gets lazy. Sharp at the start, then a while into the conversation it forgets what they were even doing and starts handing him mush. I asked what he was working in. The chat window. There it is. His system isn’t lazy. He gave it too much shit to look at and asked it to find one thing in the pile. It’s not tired because the model is weak. It’s tired because he never built it a memory.
That’s the actual job now. You become a memory architect. You decide what your system knows, what it reaches for, and when it reaches for it. That doesn’t get handed to the model, and it doesn’t get handed to your team. That one is yours.
Two. Spec way more than you build.
I spend something like ten times longer telling the thing exactly what I want than I spend building it. Building was never the hard part. Being clear is the hard part. Every hour I spend getting clear up front, I’d pay back ten of in troubleshooting if I skipped it. Cheapest hour there is.
Three, and this is the one most owners have backwards. You can’t pull your team somewhere you’ve never been.
The reason the CEO of ClickUp could cut his team and turn around and pay his best engineers a fortune is that his own hands are dirty. He knows what’s actually possible because he lives in it. Meanwhile there’s an owner somewhere right now annoyed his assistant won’t touch AI, while he himself is still parked in a chat window. That frustration is the tell. If you want your people in it, you go first. Not read about it. Not listen to a podcast about it. In it. You can read every book ever written on kicking a soccer ball and you still can’t play soccer until you’re on the field getting it wrong.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. The people who feel this in their gut but can’t name it yet are the ones with the most to gain, because right now it’s wide open and it won’t stay that way. Zemurray got three to five days. You’ve got a year, maybe two, before the math everybody’s ignoring becomes the math everybody prices around.
Don’t be the giant. Be the one moving while the giant schedules a meeting about it.
Ted and I went the full hour on this one. The 100x organization, the $10K designer who got fired in three days, the wardrobe that meets you at your hotel, and why two people are about to run down companies a thousand times their size. Come watch it.