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Deep Dive into Less Is Leverage — How Nordic Small Teams Outrun Companies 10x Their Size
A 6-person Nordic team just beat a 45-person Silicon Valley team to the same AI problem — same scope, same brief, completely different drag on coordination, energy, and talent.
👉 What if the real advantage in modern tech isn’t hiring more people, but removing the layers that slow small teams from moving at full speed?👉 What if AI becomes the multiplier that lets a six-person squad deliver what used to take twenty — without the meetings, hand-offs, or hierarchy?👉 What if Gen Z is accelerating the Nordic shift because they reject bloated orgs and choose environments where autonomy, trust, and impact are actually real?
Look across Northern Europe and the pattern is hard to ignore:
🎮 Supercell runs multi-billion-euro games with teams the size of a dinner table — and still hits €6.05M revenue per employee.🎧 Spotify turns 8–10 person squads into a global feature engine — shipping in weeks, not quarters, by stripping away approvals and trusting the people closest to the work.💳 Pleo proves that 4-day weeks and 6–8 person pods can increase output — more product shipped, higher retention, cleaner talent pipelines.🛴 Voi puts six people on an AI routing problem a US competitor staffed with forty-five — and the Nordic team ships first, cheaper, and with better performance.
The common thread isn’t just “nice culture.” It’s a very specific way of running product teams:
* Teams capped under 10 so coordination never becomes the real job
* Clear ownership with the people who design, ship, and fix the product
* AI treated as a seventh team member, not a bullet point on a slide
* Talent that actively chooses depth, autonomy, and visibility over logo-chasing and title inflation
As AI speeds up the work itself, coordination — not engineering — becomes the bottleneck. And that’s exactly where Nordic companies are already lighter: fewer meetings, tighter scopes, cleaner hand-offs, almost no space for “managers managing managers.”
Most companies are still trying to buy speed by adding headcount.The Nordics are proving something very different:
Speed isn’t about how many people you hire.It’s about how few people you need to ship something meaningful.
That’s the six-person team that beat Silicon Valley.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jerryhualibaba.substack.com/subscribe
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By Jerry HuA 6-person Nordic team just beat a 45-person Silicon Valley team to the same AI problem — same scope, same brief, completely different drag on coordination, energy, and talent.
👉 What if the real advantage in modern tech isn’t hiring more people, but removing the layers that slow small teams from moving at full speed?👉 What if AI becomes the multiplier that lets a six-person squad deliver what used to take twenty — without the meetings, hand-offs, or hierarchy?👉 What if Gen Z is accelerating the Nordic shift because they reject bloated orgs and choose environments where autonomy, trust, and impact are actually real?
Look across Northern Europe and the pattern is hard to ignore:
🎮 Supercell runs multi-billion-euro games with teams the size of a dinner table — and still hits €6.05M revenue per employee.🎧 Spotify turns 8–10 person squads into a global feature engine — shipping in weeks, not quarters, by stripping away approvals and trusting the people closest to the work.💳 Pleo proves that 4-day weeks and 6–8 person pods can increase output — more product shipped, higher retention, cleaner talent pipelines.🛴 Voi puts six people on an AI routing problem a US competitor staffed with forty-five — and the Nordic team ships first, cheaper, and with better performance.
The common thread isn’t just “nice culture.” It’s a very specific way of running product teams:
* Teams capped under 10 so coordination never becomes the real job
* Clear ownership with the people who design, ship, and fix the product
* AI treated as a seventh team member, not a bullet point on a slide
* Talent that actively chooses depth, autonomy, and visibility over logo-chasing and title inflation
As AI speeds up the work itself, coordination — not engineering — becomes the bottleneck. And that’s exactly where Nordic companies are already lighter: fewer meetings, tighter scopes, cleaner hand-offs, almost no space for “managers managing managers.”
Most companies are still trying to buy speed by adding headcount.The Nordics are proving something very different:
Speed isn’t about how many people you hire.It’s about how few people you need to ship something meaningful.
That’s the six-person team that beat Silicon Valley.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jerryhualibaba.substack.com/subscribe