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Building a 10 person unicorn - Max Brodeur-Urbas, Gumloop
Takeaway
Tiny AI-native teams win by hiring obsessively, eliminating meetings, automating internally with your own product, and recruiting customers as employees.
Summary
- Gumloop (YC W24) raised a Series A as a team of 2 and aims to scale to unicorn with under 10 people — workflow automation tool used by large enterprises.
- Hiring playbook: be brutally picky (don't lower the bar — quote from Instacart co-founder), product-led hiring (two customers quit jobs to join), and multi-day Airbnb work trials to confirm fit.
- Operations: nearly no meetings, calendars stay blank for builders, founder talks to customers; team automates every internal workflow inside Gumloop itself.
- Team culture: hire generalists better than yourself; founder describes role as writing 'stupid feature descriptions' and getting out of the way.
- Started as AgentHub UI for AutoGen; pivoted on the insight that users were really describing workflows, not autonomous agents.
startupshiringgumloop
Original description
An overview of how Gumloop is scaling automation across companies like Instacart, Webflow and Shopify with less than 10 people. About Max Brodeur-Urbas ex-microsoft engineer, started Gumloop in my bedroom and scaled to millions in ARR with a hyper-lean team Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter