We think the best team size is one, because a single author can do things that is impossible to do for teams, and hit high notes that are unreachable.

When solo beats the committee

There's something counterintuitive happening in how we talk about achievement. We celebrate collaboration and teamwork constantly, yet the most distinctive creative breakthroughs often come from individuals working alone. A single person can follow an obsessive thread without committee compromise, can make weird creative choices that feel risky to defend to others, can maintain a coherent vision when decisions pile up. This isn't about being lonely—it's about coherence.

The tricky part is that most real work in the world requires coordination. You can't build Shopify entirely solo. So maybe the insight isn't that bigger teams are always worse, but that there's something genuinely lost when you add people. Each new person adds communication overhead, requires consensus-building, creates the need for compromise. Sometimes that's worth it. Often it's not. We've been trained to think "team" automatically means "better," but that confuses scale with quality.

What this really points to is how protective we should be of solo time and individual ownership—even within organizations. The most creative people often need stretches where they're not negotiating or explaining, just building. The best teams might actually be groups of people who get significant chunks of independent work, then come together strategically.