The Age of Builders and Doers

Contributed by Matt Silver - Congrats On All The Progress

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks thinking about what this year is going to look like — and more broadly, how companies are going to be built from here on out.

If you zoom out and ignore the headlines for a second, there’s a pretty simple pattern emerging underneath all the noise:

We’re entering the age of builders and doers.

The companies that win over the next decade won’t be the ones that stack up the biggest headcount, the most layers of management, or the fanciest org charts.

They’ll be the ones where a relatively small group of people operates with the impact of a much larger company because they know how to do three things:

1. See clearly what needs to exist.
2. Build it themselves (or with a tiny crew).
3. Use AI and automation as a multiplier, not a buzzword.

If you’re a founder, operator, or aspiring leader, this shift should feel both a little terrifying and extremely exciting.

Let me explain.

The Old Playbook: Headcount as Strategy

For a long time, the mental model for building a company looked something like this:

• Raise money.
• Use that money to hire people.
• Promote your “best” individual contributors into managers.
• Layer more managers on top of managers as you grow.
• Build big departments around functions: Sales, Ops, Marketing, Product, etc.

If you were a founder, success often got measured (quietly) in headcount.

“I run a 40-person sales org.”  

“We’ve got 25 people in operations.”  

“We doubled the team this year.”

I ran into someone at the Bears game this weekend who’s running a company with hundreds of employees. The thought of building something that large, from a people perspective, was honestly daunting. My gut reaction was, “Oh man, my goal is to keep our team as small as possible and just make sure everyone has tools that 10–100x their impact.”

Headcount was a proxy for progress.

This model made sense when:

• Tools were primitive. A lot of work was truly manual.
• Data was hard to access. Answering basic questions required whole teams.
• Internal systems were brittle. “Don’t touch that spreadsheet, it might break.”
• The coordination cost of getting things done was high.

If you wanted to build a new function, the assumption was: “We need to staff it.”

You’d hire a manager, then a few ICs, then a manager over those managers, and so on. If you wanted to “be a leader,” that often meant getting out of the work and into managing the work.

Today, that model is breaking.

What’s Changed: The Human Possibility Frontier

When people talk about AI, they usually frame it as a question of replacement.

• “Will it replace SDRs?”  
• “Will it replace copywriters?”  
• “Will it replace data analysts?”  

I think that’s the wrong frame.

A more accurate question is: What does one motivated person now have the capacity to do when they’re plugged into tools like Notion Agents, Claude, ChatGPT, Nano Banana — and effectively have access to unlimited scale?

Because that’s what has changed most dramatically in the last 12–18 months.

A concrete example

In the last few weeks alone, I’ve used AI tools like Notion AI and Claude Code to:

• Pull together a customer intelligence database that previously would’ve taken a team weeks.
• Build and compare multiple pricing and compensation models.
• Map customer and prospect locations to plan travel and coverage strategy.
• Create analytical deep dives into coverage gaps in lanes, regions, or customer segments.
• Set OKR baselines from messy historical data.

I didn’t magically become a full-stack engineer or a data scientist. I didn’t learn to write production-level code.

What changed is:

• The tools are finally good enough.
• The interfaces are finally usable.
• And I stopped accepting “that would be nice to have, but we don’t have the bandwidth” as an answer.

All of the tasks above would’ve historically required a chain of events:

• Scoping a project.
• Getting on the product or data team’s roadmap.
• Waiting for someone to write scripts, build dashboards, update data pipelines.

Now, a founder who is willing to get their hands dirty and learn a new workflow can accomplish a lot of this in a few focused sessions.

This is happening everywhere:

• Sales leaders building their own custom reporting or qualification workflows.
• Ops leaders automating onboarding, billing, and fulfillment steps without asking for engineering time.
• Founders prototyping new internal tools or even product features themselves before a single ticket gets filed.

The frontier of “what’s humanly possible for one person” has moved.

And we’re still underestimating how far.

From Function Leaders to Function Builders

In the old world, you hired “function leaders” to run departments.

Their job was to:

• Set strategy.
• Define org charts.
• Hire and manage teams.
• Put processes in place and make sure people followed them.

In the new world, I think that role gets replaced by function builders.

What’s the difference?

A function builder is someone who:

• Looks at a blank page and can design how a function should work.
• Gets in the weeds to build the first version — systems, workflows, tooling, documentation.
• Uses AI and automation as default ingredients, not optional add-ons.
• Operates with a builder’s mindset even if their title says “Head of X” or “VP of Y.”

They might still manage people. They might still have a leadership title. But their primary value is not how many direct reports they have. It’s their ability to create and own a working system.

This is a very different skillset than “I can run a 50-person team.”

If you’re hiring, the questions start to change:

• Not: “Have you managed a large team before?”  
• But: “Have you ever built a function from scratch and made it work?”  
• Not: “How many people did you oversee?”  
• But: “What systems did you design? What workflows did you implement? What did you personally build?”  

And if you’re an individual contributor or mid-level manager trying to grow your career, your playbook should change too.

Instead of optimizing for, “How do I get more people reporting to me?” you want to optimize for, “How do I become the person who can build and run an entire function with a small team and the right tools?”

Operators With Agency

There’s a particular kind of person who thrives in this environment. I think of them as operators with agency.

You probably know a few of these people already. They’re the ones who:

• Don’t wait to be told what to do.
• See the gaps and quietly build the systems to close them.
• Learn adjacent skills without making a big deal out of it.
• Volunteer to own messy, unscoped problems and bring order to them.

If they run customer success, they’re not just responding to tickets — they’re designing the onboarding journey, automating repetitive touchpoints, and building health score systems.

If they run sales, they’re not just managing pipeline — they’re building a repeatable motion, instrumenting data, and automating the mind-numbing admin work.

If they run people ops, they’re not just scheduling reviews and onboarding new hires — they’re building the internal infrastructure that keeps the whole company running smoothly.

They’re builders disguised as “leaders” or “ICs.”

View the original post on Matt Silver's Substack, "Congrats On All The Progress."