Frontier Firms: Automating and Amplifying The Best Fewest

SuperGrok’s Idea of a Neon Unicorn Company

An engineer is someone who can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar.

~ Arthur M. Wellington

First, as always, i hope everyone is safe. Second, i am writing this piece from a suggestion of a dear friend and one of the best creative minds that i know; in fact, I consider them an autodidactic polymath, as most are in these parts of the universe.

So strap in and grab a raccoon skin hat, we’re diving headfirst into the wild, neon-charged world of frontier firms! (get it raccoon hat – frontier?) Let’s crank up the volume (to eleven, of course) and break it all down with some serious flair (office space reference there)!

GOAL: The premise is to build a company with no more than 7-10 people that achieves a One-Billion valuation.

OUTCOME: Then, in turn, each human creates and makes a frontier firm. Generational wealth is created. Exponentiation realized.

Lo and behold, there is a new term for that called Frontier Firm.

From the latest and greatest LazyWeb^(TM) definition:

“A frontier firm is a company that excels in leveraging AI to fundamentally reshape its operations and achieve a competitive advantage, often by integrating AI agents into various business processes. These firms move beyond basic AI adoption, using AI to create human-AI teams that drive faster decision-making, innovation, and increased efficiency. Essentially, frontier firms are pioneering a new model of work where AI and humans collaborate to redefine industries. “

i would add “or to define new industries”.

The Myth of the Massive Crew

Back in the golden days of Silicon Valley (1990-2000), before there was sand and yes, some of us are still around, the gospel was all about scaling to the moon: pack in more people, churn out more code, and drown in a sea of endless planning meetings. The battle cry? “Scale wins!” But hold onto your raccoon skin hats, because that old-school belief is crumbling faster than a sandcastle caught in a tidal wave!

The frontier firm is shaking things up, and frontier founders are leading the charge: the tiniest teams, loaded with the sharpest minds, are the ones dropping the biggest economic and technological bombshells in today’s world. These are the frontier firms, lean, mean, dancing machines. They don’t bloat up with a swarm of bodies or butts in seaets; instead, they weave raw intelligence into the very heartbeat of their systems, creating an unstoppable force. Let’s unpack this rocket fuel of an idea and see what makes it tick! About as close to Idea2Bank as one can get!

You can do anything you want to do
It’s not wrong what I’m saying, it’s true
You can do anything you want to do
Do what you want to

~ Thin Lizzy

The Frontier Ain’t Crowded

A frontier firm doesn’t just exist, it thrives in the wild, uncharted territories where the average crowd throws up their hands and says, “Nah, that’s too tough!” or “Never been done before, so why bother?” NOTE: This is related to a blog i wrote called “Being Legit: On Imposter Syndrome”.

This is the playground of the fearless, and it includes mind-blowing domains like autonomous military systems charging through imaging workflows, kinetic AI inference powering split-second decisions, cyber-physical systems syncing the digital and physical worlds into a seamless dance, generative strategy paired with cell replacement therapies, or dreaming up the next big leap, and bio-digital convergence merging the pulse of life with the flow of code. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill apps, folks, they’re foundational earthquakes that shift the ground beneath our feet! When the stakes soar to the heavens or hells, whichever you work best within, it’s that one genius move, executed at the perfect moment, that outguns a hundred latecomers fumbling in the dark. That’s the razor-sharp edge of the frontier, and it’s where the legends are born! “There is an app for that” is now a thing of the past. There is an agent(s) for that is the new battle cry!

The Best Few: Talent That Packs a Devastating Pull Request

Forget the image of 250 engineers hunched over desks in a sprawling cubicle farm, churning out lines of code. In a frontier firm, you only need a tight crew of five people who each bring 10 times the brains, guts, and sheer determination to the table to build something extraordinary. These aren’t just your average coders or project managers—they’re force multipliers who craft systems so powerful they spawn even more systems, a self-sustaining engine of innovation. What sets these unicorn-builders apart is their ability to crush time, zipping from that “aha!” moment to a launched product while others are still drafting their first email. They’ve got a sixth sense for seeing around corners, predicting failure states, and designing architectures that bend but never break. And they don’t just make products, they forge inevitability, creating outcomes that feel destined to happen. This isn’t about elitism—it’s a survival tactic honed for the frontier. Piling on more people in these high-stakes domains muddies the waters, drags communication into a quagmire, and breeds a chaos of decision entropy. What you need is mission compression, a laser focus that turns a small team into a powerhouse, not a headcount explosion that dilutes the vision!

The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty.

~ Chris Sacca

Why This Sparks Unicorn Magic

Unicorns don’t just pop up because of a fancy feature list they erupt from a nonlinear power that rewrites the game. Imagine the thrill of blazing-fast inference at the edge, dominating fields like defensetech, healthtech , fintech, logistics/supplychain, climatetech and vehicle autonomy with split-second precision. Picture tiny, laser-focused teams that ship faster than a rocket, pivot smoother than a dancer, and burn less cash than their bloated rivals with technical debt they believe they need to keep running. Feel the rush of zero-drag vibes (assuming the LLM your using is vibing), where ideas leap from brain to github without getting lost in a middleman mess. When you strip out the organizational noise and bring on board folks who think and move like founders, you compound precision into a force of nature. That’s the secret sauce behind frontier valuation, and it’s got investors sitting up and taking notice! They’re not throwing money at size anymore, they’re riding the set wave of talent velocity, betting on the speed and smarts of the best few to change the world! (Note: A set wave is a surfing vernacular where waves do travel in sets, and a set wave is the best in the set.)

Wealth is the thing YOU want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep; it’s the factory of robots cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program running at night that’s serving other customers. Wealth is money in the bank that is reinvested into other assets and businesses.

~ Naval Ravikant

How to Forge Your Frontier Firm

If you’re itching to build a unicorn-level crew with the best few, here’s what i have been considering as a playbook. First, go out and grab paradigm shifters, people who don’t just crank out code but also dream up strategy, architect game-changing systems, and design protocols that last. Like know what Total Addressable Market stands for as well as what Vector Database can (and cannot do), or what Product Market Fit means, and understand a RELU function. These are whole stack wizards who see the big picture and make it happen. Yes, they do exist also some people desire to learn more and keep learning.

Next, operate like a special ops squad on a covert mission, not a lumbering battalion. Every person must be a mission-critical rockstar, with no dead weight and no lag to slow you down. Then, master the art of saying “no” to 95% of the noise out there, saving your thunderous “yes” for the moments that feel like life or death. Clarity is your jet fuel, and drift is your kryptonite. Build systems that ditch the need for extra headcount, automating absolutely everything that doesn’t require that human spark, letting machines handle the grunt work while your team soars. Hot wire chat systems, CRM, finances, and expenses as much as possible. Autobot marketing and sales leads. Automate that enterprise value funnel! For the below table OKRs, KOIs and METRICS FOR EVERYTHING! Be Maniacal – Log All The Things (LATTs)!

Domain	Initial Approach	Tools	Scaling Strategy
Accounting	Use fractional CFO or boutique firm with startup/industry focus	TechCxO, Pilot, Bench, or AirCFO	Migrate to NetSuite or Sage Intacct when funding or traction passes Series A
Finance	Build a zero-based budgeting model around mission-critical ops only – (please so not pass around .xls)	Fathom, Mosaic, or Causal (maybe Salesforce for Slack)	Implement driver-based forecasting + integrate with ERP and CRM for real-time planning
ERP / Ops	Avoid ERP until extreme Product Market Fit – start with Notion + Airtable+Zapier to simulate operational workflows	Airtable, Retool, Zapier, Notion	Content flywheel via Medium, X threads, Substack > video proof > hyper-tailored outbound
Recruiting	Only hire proven elite; use founder network, DM campaigns, and test-first recruiting	Ashby, Gem, Notion, AngelList / Pallet	Deploy scorecards, embedded recruiters, automated outreach; internal dev talent brand assets – WordOfMouth (teams network)
Marketing	Narrative warfare: 1 founder-led blog, 1 developer page,1 tight landing page, 1 mythic tagline	Webflow, Ghost, Canva, Substack – heck github.io	Content flywheel via Medium, X threads, Substack > video proof > hyper tailored outbound
Compliance / Security	Design from Day 0 for HIPPA/SOC2/ATO/DFARS/NIST/FedRAMP trajectory (even pre-revenue)	JupiterOne, Drata, Vanta, Prometheus agent logs	Automate compliance workflows + pre-cert with MSSP partner for faster deployment

Finally, don’t chase the latest market trends; build what reality screams for, being early, a little strange, and dead-on right. Usually, this means creating the most seemingly unsexy stacks in existence. That’s how you forge a frontier firm that stands the test of time! This type of scale yields Revenue Per Employee (RPE), and, in my opinion, that is the key metric for any company. Well, that, and a 100% margin, would be nice to have as well.

Life Itself is Exponential.

~ Jeff Rich

The Real Frontier Lives in YOUR Mind

For some, the thought of crafting a company with 10 elite minds is a whole lot scarier than corralling 100 mediocre folks into a chaotic herd. There’s no room to hide when every choice carries weight, and every person is thrust into the spotlight. But that’s the fire you walk through to create something that deserves to exist, a legacy worth fighting for. Nail it, and watch the magic unfold: a 10-human frontier firm can flip an entire sector on its head, a 20-human (split) squad can rewrite the rulebook of civilization itself! The best few don’t grow like traditional companies; they grow like legends, leaving a mark that echoes through history.

Here is a checklist on what the few do with agentic amplification:

✅ Compress and bend time
✅ Build systems that build systems
✅ See around corners
✅ Eliminate coordination drag
✅ Operate with founder-mind clarity

The Final Push

You don’t need a crowd clogging up the works, you need gravity that pulls brilliance together into an unstoppable force (Gravitas Inc for a company name, anyone?). Take <Insert Idea Here>. Get the best fewest. Git on it, changing the game, one bold, brilliant pull request at time.

The best few don’t scale like companies.
They scale like legacies.

Until then,

#iwishyouwater <- one of GOATs Tom Curren – From Searching for Tom Curren

Ted ℂ. Tanner Jr. (@tctjr) / X

Muzak To Blog By: Bach By Stokowski, Leopold Stowkowski and Symphonica Orchestra, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor BWV582 has always been one of my favorites. This recording from 1997 was remastered. HAIL JS BACH!.

Q: Anyone care to name the unicorn in the picture? i do think it would listen to Groove Is In The Heart.