The best products I’ve seen come from teams small enough to fit around a table. There’s something about constraint that forces clarity — about what matters, what doesn’t, and what you’re actually trying to say with the thing you’re making.
Sofa was two people. Framer started tiny and stayed that way for a long time, by design. Not because we couldn’t hire. Because we thought quality of thinking mattered more than output volume. A small team with strong convictions moves with a kind of coherence that’s hard to replicate once you scale.
The challenge is what happens when you grow. Every person you add brings new perspectives, but also new coordination costs. The seams start to show. Things that were implicit have to become explicit. Processes, principles, taste.
The answer isn’t to stay small forever. It’s to preserve the conditions that made the small team work: shared context, direct communication, an environment where anyone can see the whole thing and care about it. That’s harder at thirty people than at five. But it’s the job.
At Festina, the venture firm Koen and I run alongside Framer, we look for founders who have this in their DNA. People building with a small group and a very clear idea of what they’re doing and why. Those are the teams that surprise you.