Luca Ferrari bought Evernote in 2023. It came with 341 employees. He says he runs it with 20 now. I heard him say it on David Senra's Founders podcast this week and had to go back and listen again. Four layers of management collapsed into two. The code rebuilt. Across the whole company, revenue per core employee went from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. Forbes put that ahead of Apple. Interview's linked below. If you run a company, it's really mind-blowing stuff. I really love the Michael Dell interview, too. Heck, I liked all of them. Set aside whether you like how they got there. Look at what a company built that way does to the guy across the street. Two firms, same revenue, same expense budget. One carries 350 people. The other carries 60. Call it $120,000 a head fully loaded, and that's $42 million of payroll against $7.2 million. The lean one has almost $35 million a year that isn't going to payroll, and it doesn't bank it. That money buys product, price cuts you can't match, and your best two people at a number you can't beat. Payroll you never committed to becomes ammunition somebody else is aiming at you. The standard line right now is that AI isn't taking jobs, it's making people more efficient. Efficiency means the same work in fewer hours. Fewer hours means fewer people on the payroll, or the same people absorbing work you used to hire for. Enterprise software gets approved on a payback number, and for these tools the payback is often labor savings. What it can't do is finish. It runs a workflow most of the way and stops at the part that needs a person: the judgment call, the signature, the thing that has to be physically done, the check on whether the output is any good. Those junctions are staffed by people today and the software isn't close to clearing them. So the future isn't an empty building. It's far fewer people, paid more. Ferrari says his top engineers make over $250,000. Evernote's own IPO prospectus shows 2025 revenue 30% above 2022, with revenue per user up 150% and users down 48%. Price did that, on a base that can't easily move ten years of notes somewhere else. Twitter, now X, went from 7,500 people to about 1,800, roughly doubled EBITDA, and lost half its revenue getting there. Lean cuts both ways. Imagine Luca bought your company tomorrow. Who does he cut in the first ninety days, and what does he replace them with? You already know some of the names. Do it yourself, before you're the one selling to him.