Missionaries, Managers, Masters
Are startups having their Michelin moment?
In the 1980s, every ambitious restaurant hired more cooks, bought bigger spaces, opened multiple locations. Then something curious happened: three-star Michelin restaurants started getting smaller. Fewer tables. Tiny kitchens. The chef back on the line. Why? Because at the frontier of taste, coordination costs more than the coordination buys you. Every hand that touches the dish dilutes the vision.
One question I’m wondering these days: Are technology startups having their Michelin moment?
Tldr; in this essay I will argue that:
New startups are bifurcating between large upfront bets and momentum companies; ‘growing into quality’ is a luxury that only few founders can afford now.
What’s required in most categories is a combination of momentum + excellence; mission and money alone often fails in today’s environment.
There is a new founder generation that I call ‘masters’: they are neither missionaries or mercenaries but rather treat company-building as a craft.
Setting The Table
Every successful venture is a mirror of its time - shaped by the capital, culture, and crises that define its era. So it’s important to understand how the environment for venture-backed startups has fundamentally changed.
The ecosystem evolved from a small cottage industry to a headline industry. Take the coverage as an example. In early days, a handful of small blogs posted about startup news. Now, we have entire live programming platforms covering non-stop in CBNC style. Hires are portrayed as if they were NBA trades.
This evolution has significant impact on how founders and companies operate.
Today, most early-stage startups face hyper-competition in their respective categories. Ideas with clear market need attract dozens of competitors. Take for example the GEO space, which tracks close to 100 companies. Every category has at least a handful of well-funded players.
Meanwhile, venture firms have grown in size and quantity. Only nine firms were accountable for 50% of capital raised in 2024. A16z alone raised roughly 11%, and just announced new funds totaling $10bn.
Founders find themselves in a binary fundraising environment. Ever larger seeds have become common, but fewer companies get funded overall. These mega seeds are not the ‘avocado seeds’ from a few years ago, but surpass traditional growth stage sizes. Only a few of these fat bets on elite proven founders + large mission exist, so most of the remaining money is flowing into momentum rounds.
What investors value today has not fundamentally changed: Team pedigree, unique insight, and momentum - ideally a combination of them. But how exactly these crystallize depends on the cycle of the market. Momentum therefore functions like norm-referenced grading in relation to other companies in the market. You get compared to the best in the class.
Of course momentum is equally important for founders that want to build lasting companies. In hyper-competitive markets, you might get only a short window to establish category position before markets consolidate. No one expects 50+ companies to survive within one category. Like in social networks, ride-sharing, and delivery apps before, consolidation will happen from from hundreds of companies to only a few.
Taking competitive density, capital concentration, and acceleration dynamics together, today’s environment favors founders who know how to build.
The structural market changes require adaptations on how to build early-stage startups compared to earlier periods (e.g. compared to the last SaaS decade):
(1) The ‘growing into quality’ model is dead. When money was cheap during ZIRP and expected growth timelines longer, you could hire your way through problems. The environment rewarded process over judgment, scale over craft, ‘let’s try everything’ (aka growth-hacking) over conviction. Today, the market expects excellence and high quality products from day one.
(2) Building in stealth is similarly dying out. In a market filled with noise and countless competitors, your main goal is to stay top of mind. Distribution is key for generating momentum. Being in stealth for 2 years means dozens of direct competitors are gaining your buyer’s attention. The public is watching your release log closely.
So what does it take for founders to build a world-class business in this era?
I’ve started to think about three different archetypes:
The Missionary, the Manager, the Master.
I: The Missionaries
Ask anyone about legendary founders and they will likely name Steve or Elon. Maybe Sam.
Many role models are missionary founders. They pursue a singular vision over decades. They regularly defy market timing and create markets with their will power. One of their superpowers is the ability to bring people behind their mission.
But missionaries have become a small minority. For every Musk, there are a dozen Butterfields.
A big reason for that is that the missionary founder sold a story they couldn’t keep.
The core promise to bring people on their journey was: “Believe in the mission, accept below-market comp, equity will pay off.” But often founders find themselves pivoting 2-3 times before finding traction. The YC school of company-building optimizes for finding product-market fit fast, not pursuing a specific mission. What starts as “democratizing AI for education” becomes “enterprise workflow automation.” This isn’t a criticism - it’s rational.
Even if they aspire to, it’s hard for founders to be missionaries in this environment. Like companies get shaped by their markets, also founders have to adapt to their surroundings. AI’s gold rush has generally encouraged pragmatic, sometimes ruthless behavior.
The social-economic environment has shifted too: what actually motivates founders has changed. One observation that stuck with me: the average 21-year-old founder is no longer driven by greed (Ellison) or idealism (Jobs); they’re driven by fame.
Founder motivation has always been shaped by what’s valued in their era. In the ‘90s, wealth was the ultimate signal. In the ‘00s, changing-the-world idealism. Today, for a generation raised on platforms, status and recognition are the currency.
Where early founders arrived at building companies almost by accident, being a founder has become en vogue. The youngest generation is dominated by high-achieving STEM grads who see starting a company as a logical career step. Being a YC founder has become the best proxy for status.
The cynical take: founding has become the ‘next box to check’ rather than ‘contrarian truth.’ The optimistic take: we get the smartest people excited about entrepreneurship and changing industries.
Critically, this generation brings native distribution skills. Where marketers previously had to persuade founders to be active on socials, younger founders now their leverage their personal brand. They understand content and attention intuitively.
When status and recognition drive you, pivoting becomes easier than persisting. The missionary promise - “believe in the mission for a decade” - loses its binding power.
Of course, there is still a small but strong minority of missionary founders. And they have strong advantages on their side, too.
Take Anthropic as an example in the AI space. Since founding, they’ve built a strong mission-first culture that shapes all aspects of the company. This reportedly led to higher retention rates despite paying below the market and a strict no salary renegotiation policy, especially when compared to their direct peers.
Similarly, founders with a strong track record and a larger-than-life mission often attract “fat bets” early on, raising exceptionally large amounts of funding pre-product. While these certainly make the headlines, these companies represent a tiny fraction of the market.
We all love the missionary. Their idealism is contagious and we want them to succeed. But they have become a small minority.
II: The Managers
Far from loved is the mercenary. You can fill a book only with quotes on why missionaries are preferred over mercenaries.
“Mercenaries leave when the going gets tough.”
“Mercenaries work for money, missionaries work for meaning.”
And so on…
There might be truth in some of them, but I want to provide a different perspective. To do that without the usual negative connotation, I think of this as the Manager archetype.
The Manager founder approaches company-building as orchestration. Once they recognize a market opportunity, they see scaling as a repeatable process: identify the pattern, raise capital, hire experienced operators, delegate execution. Their superpower is coordination - building systems, attracting VP-level talent, and steering a growing organization.
Remember, founders adapt to their markets. The ZIRP/blitzscaling era rewarded exactly these skills and let Manager founders thrive.
Throughout the early 2010s and late 2010s, the asset class saw an inflow of money into the asset class due to low interest rates that enabled more aggressive funding. Entrepreneurs established an emerging playbook for scaling companies probably best described in Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling.
The key pillars of that playbook revolved around:
Speed over efficiency: The core principle is to grow as fast as possible, even if it means operating inefficiently or unprofitably. The idea is that capturing market share quickly is more valuable than optimizing unit economics early on.
Growth over excellence: Blitzscaling companies intentionally tolerate chaos, imperfect processes, and organizational dysfunction because taking time to build perfect systems would slow growth. The philosophy is “do things that don’t scale” and fix problems reactively rather than proactively. Hiring happens so fast that quality sometimes suffers, and internal systems lag behind headcount growth.
Iteration over perfection: Blitzscalers launch imperfect products and iterate rapidly. The focus is on distribution and network effects over product refinement. The mantra is moving fast and dealing with consequences later, whether technical debt, or product gaps.
Some exceptional companies were built in that decade that way, and some of the most successful scale-ups still operate that way.
But the current environment challenges this approach in multiple ways:
In new frontier markets like AI and robotics, old frameworks don’t translate. Pricing, distribution, product, margins - all being rethought as we’re into this early phase of a new technology shift. Founders need to embrace playbook obsolescence.
This creates an experience paradox. The ‘hire experienced people and get out of their way’ model fails when their experience doesn’t map to the present. You can’t delegate your way to victory when there’s no playbook to delegate.
Meanwhile, AI has caused a team size inversion. Small, hyper-productive teams leveraging AI can now out-execute large teams despite coordination advantages. The investor math changed too - with rising interest rates, Rule of 40 and revenue per employee matter more.
Managers still thrive in specific categories that require massive coordination - Mercor and Scale AI have both grown tremendously in revenue and org size. But these are exceptions where coordination itself is the product.
But the time where you could ‘field general’ your way to success - when playbooks existed and time was more forgiving - is over.
III: The Master Founder
The Master founder is a different archetype entirely.
They are neither a prophet with 10-year vision (Missionary). Nor an orchestrator executing playbooks (Manager). They see themselves as a craftsperson with taste, building something excellent with small team. Company-building is almost to them an artisanal model (or an artistry?) - more like running a restaurant or architecture firm, where the owner runs in every detail.
Take Linear as an example. Karri Saarinen and team have built one of the most beloved B2B products with a famously small team, obsessive attention to craft, and a design sensibility that permeates every interaction. Or consider Midjourney: David Holz kept his team at around 11 people while generating over $200M in revenue - perhaps the most extreme example of craft density in the AI era.
Again, markets form their founders. Founders have become way more wary of the scaling aggressively playbook. They perceive it as scaling prematurely, especially with multiple high-profile failures in the past.
And today’s hyper-competition specifically favors Masters over well-funded managers (though funding still helps):
Customers expect teams to provide much better products from day 1 and iterate much faster to stay ahead of the peers. These faster iteration cycles mean that, in turn, communication overhead becomes easily fatal, and therefore small teams with unified taste win.
That’s why taste becomes the bottleneck, not capital or coordination. And why we’ve heard so much about taste and founder mode in the last 2 years.
AI plays a key role to this. The ability of small teams to dramatically increase their shipping rate tilts the previous tension between small teams with cognitive efficiencies versus large teams with execution efficiencies.
A Master can achieve ‘hyper-craft density’ with <50 people and still hit unicorn valuations, creating a new category of ‘artisanal unicorns’ (maybe even the one-person unicorn). Midjourney, amongst others, proves this isn’t theoretical - 11 people generated unicorn-level outcomes by leveraging AI to amplify craft rather than headcount.
The Master model inverts the returns to scale. Small teams can out-execute large teams as a structural advantage, but this is only possible because AI enables craft at scale.
Masters still scale - just not the kitchen. Various AI-native companies have shown to become lean unicorns and decacorns achieving $200M+ ARR with hundreds rather than thousands of people - dramatically leaner than the last SaaS era’s typical $125k revenue per employee.
Take ElevenLabs: The CEO kept interviewing every hire, the org is built around micro-teams that own product surfaces end to end, titles are minimized to keep decisions close to builders. Headcount has grown to cover work that scales with adoption and expanding product surface. This is scale in the shell while the taste-led core stays tight.
But what characterizes the master archetype?
Masters see themselves as player-coaches: Instead of honing their management chops, the master founder sees themselves ultimately as a IC more than a manager. Instead of focusing on building a team, they often already have built a foundation of the product with their founding team.
Masters have taste: The best ICs only want to work for masters themselves. Taste is a good proxy for skills, as taste can only be developed by being greatly skilled in a field. Ultimately, (lack of) taste caps the highest level whom you can recruit. And the easiest way to fast and aligned decision-making is hiring people with the same taste.
Masters love excellence: They reject the notion that speed and quality can’t go hand in hand. And because masters are builders themselves, they can identify exceptional people easily. They do not just look for impressive credentials. They let them do work trials. They use judgment over process. But that also means they have an incredibly high bar for who they work with, and often struggle to fill roles fast.
With their abilities, masters create a new binding mechanism: momentum + craft. Momentum always creates gravity - people want to be on winning teams. And there is an incredible pride in craft: “look what we built with 15 people” versus “look at our headcount”.
The combination brings them a competitive advantage because it’s hard to bind with mission (too unstable through pivots) or with money alone (creates mercenary dynamic). But you can bind with: we’re winning, learning fast, building something excellent.
The Master archetype plays by being exceptional at the craft and scaling it in new ways - taste, judgment, clarity, and creating environment for a small team of masters.
I’m curious who you would associate with this.
Reflections
Maybe we’ve been asking ‘how do we make AI companies more like Google?’ while the real question is ‘how do we prevent them from becoming Google?’
Maybe the Master founder archetype is closer to its original heritage. A craftsperson who builds something with their hands (and small team). Who knows quality because they’ve done the work. Who still has a vision, but is grounded in reality and pragmatism.
However, it does not seem like a romantic renaissance at all. This environment is difficult for founders to thrive. Hyper-competition filters for flawless execution. Fundraises and outcomes are binary.
Still, speed premiums on valuations reward small teams with masters. In an absence of proven ways to scale at the frontier, you can’t hide behind org chart, process, hired talent. Your taste, judgment, capabilities are exposed. For builders at heart, this work is rewarding.
That isn’t to say there is no space for the missionary or managerial archetype founders today. They should pick their battle wisely. If they do so, they can leverage their edge and build differentiated businesses.
I believe none of the archetypes are inherently better than the other. Building and scaling companies is extraordinarily hard, no matter which archetype. They all deserve the same respect.
All of them come from intrinsic motivations: Changing the world (Missionaries), building a great company for people to work at (Managers), and getting recognized for their work (Masters). Great founders build resilience because they know why they do it.
Remember the Michelin restaurants? The Master founder isn’t running a cafeteria, optimizing for volume and process. They’re running a Michelin kitchen - where every plate matters, every hire matters deeply, and the chef’s taste is the only moat that survives contact with competition.
The question isn’t whether you can scale. It’s how you scale without destroying the thing that got you started in the first place.
Thanks to Konrad Kordowski for feedback on earlier drafts.
Love this!
Really great articulation of what I’ve been feeling in marketing and GTM as well - in a world of mass-produced mediocrity, differentiation comes by doing the hard things. “Unreasonable Hospitality” by Will Guidara is a great embodiment of many of these principles - worth the read if these ideas resonate.