I cofounded a company with an AI-powered tiny team. We are picky when it comes to hiring new people — here's how to stand out. (www.businessinsider.com)

Sidhant Bendre, cofounder of AI-driven consumer software portfolio Oleve, describes how his company intentionally stays tiny by embedding AI into every workflow and hiring only people who can leverage it thoughtfully. Having built the business around AI from day one, Oleve uses a reusable, template codebase and AI for marketing, analytics and hiring, and has been recognized by OpenAI for large-scale text processing. Hiring decisions focus less on deep, irreplaceable specialization and more on candidates’ ability to learn operationally, turn domain expertise into reproducible systems, and critically evaluate AI outputs rather than treat models as drop-in replacements. The practical implications for the AI/ML community are twofold: recruitment and engineering practices are shifting. Companies must vet not just results but underlying understanding, because AI can mask gaps that become critical when shipping complex products. Bendre prefers hiring specialists for a precise need and using AI to accelerate their growth into broader roles (e.g., a backend engineer upskilling to front-end work via AI-assisted learning). He warns tiny teams have no safety net for sloppy AI-driven work—errors compound without middle management—and points to a new lean-startup playbook where individuals act like configurable “chiefs of staff,” orchestrating agent-driven workflows.