They generate over $100 million per employee.
And still refuse to hire more people.
They choose to stay fluid, agile, unpredictable.
No bureaucracy. No false comfort.
They’ve understood the game: be tiny, but lethal.
Take Tether.
Its business is simple: selling U.S. dollars in the form of cryptocurrency. Its promise? That every token is backed by a real dollar. This isn’t just convenient—it’s vital. In Argentina or Turkey, Tether has enabled millions to protect their savings from collapsing national currencies.
Result? $13 billion in net profit last year with fewer than 200 employees. That’s $80 million in net profit per employee. Not revenue—actual profit.
And Tether isn’t alone.
My favorite example: HyperLiquid. A trading platform built on its own blockchain, it lets users trade without depositing funds into a third-party account (like a bank). The adoption has been massive.
Result: millions in daily fees generated by an agile team of just 12 people. That’s well over $100 million per employee per year. Operating costs? Symbolic: salaries, laptops, internet.
In a spicier sector, OnlyFans generates over $30 million in revenue per employee—far surpassing Apple or Nvidia, which hover around “just” a few million per employee.
These numbers are jaw-dropping.
They remind us of something many have forgotten:
“Maximizing value” isn’t about filling sprints—it’s about aiming for impact.
Studying these teams, I’ve identified three replicable patterns—three high-leverage practices you can adopt.
Three high-impact levers to adopt for your teams
Their obsession: asymmetric advantage.
Like in trading, these organizations target asymmetric positions—those where a cost of X unlocks impact worth many multiples of X.
Their secret? Delegating firepower to technology.
1/ Be tech opportunists
Let’s be honest.
Scanning a QR code, solving a CAPTCHA, creating an account, verifying an email, entering a credit card, logging back in, forgetting your password.
All of this just to buy a $2.50 coffee.
Every click requires a human, somewhere, to input, moderate, or validate.
Web 2.0 now belongs right next to the phone book—in a museum.
Radical Lean starts here:
design systems that scale without depending on humans.
Web3 perfectly embodies this idea: immutable, autonomous smart contracts that run without supervision.
And the opportunity goes far beyond blockchains:
generic robot factories in China,
Tesla’s facilities,
or the hundreds of billions processed each day by Tether’s smart contracts—with no supervision, no customer service, no bloated teams.
Software or hardware, it doesn’t matter: only technologies that scale on their own count.
They’re simply better technologies.
HyperLiquid.
Tether.
OnlyFans.
Autonomous technologies disguised as companies.
It takes boldness.
2/ Be conquerors!
At the frontier between imagination and execution.
That’s where it all begins.
In other words: opportunities.
Conquerors don’t iterate on what exists.
They uncover markets no one dares imagine yet.
Was PayPal launched by the the U.S. Postal Service?
Too bad—but no.
In 2014, Uber was valued at one-third of the global taxi market.
A loss of touch with reality?
Not really.
The simplicity of the service was about to explode the size of its original market.
It’s not so much about capturing market share as pushing its boundaries.
Think OnlyFans.
Conquering is sexy.
Execution is vital.
3/ Fall in love with operations
Execution is a living art.
A shared choreography, improvised in rhythm with reality.
To love it is to live it—not to document it.
In the trenches, this means:
- Continuously accelerating Time to Market to learn faster
- Strengthening the Definition of Done—and saying goodbye to bugs
- Making re-engineering and technical debt part of daily conversations
- Having little tolerance for interdependencies between teams
- Letting the team hire the people who make it better
Trust isn’t given—it’s built, every day.
Through transparency. Through Scrum’s empiricism. Through facts.
Radical Lean isn’t a method.
It’s a way of seeing: aim for impact, not effort.
Tiny teams. Massive systems.
And one obsession: making value dance.
The rest? It’s up to you to invent it.
Or better: up to you and me to build it together.
I share more reflections like this—on tech, transformation, and what it means to lead in complex systems—in my blog