A Million People Making a Million
This week on Beyond the Prompt, Henrik and I are releasing a conversation with MIT's Christian Catalini about AGI, the economy, and why the future may not be as economically catastrophic as many people assume.
I've been thinking about that conversation alongside this piece — written by Henrik together with his Audos co-founder, Nicholas Thorne.
Most AI commentary seems trapped between two stories: collapse or compensation. Either the machines take the jobs and we're all in trouble, or the machines take the jobs and someone sends us a check. Notice what those two stories share: in both of them, you don't do anything. You're either a casualty or a claimant.
Henrik and Nicholas are arguing for a third story — not protection from disruption, but participation in what comes next.
You don't have to agree with every claim here for the piece to be useful. The value is the question underneath it: what if AI doesn't just create a handful of giant companies with almost no employees? What if it helps a lot more people build smaller, more personal, more durable businesses around communities they actually understand?
In other words: what kind of future are we practicing for?
Read it below. And if that question lands on someone specific in your life — maybe your own mom, finally starting the thing she's talked about for ten years — hit reply and tell me about her. I read every one.
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A Million People Making a Million
A third story about the future, for everyone tired of the first two.
By Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne
There are two stories about where this is all going, and you have heard both of them so many times you could tell them yourself.
The first story is the doom story. The machines take the jobs. McKinsey says up to 375 million people may need to switch occupations by 2030 [1]. Society frays, towns hollow out, and the rest of us wait to find out if we're next. In this story, ordinary people are casualties.
The second story is the compensation story. Yes, the machines take the jobs, but it's fine, because the machines also make the money, and the state mails everyone a check. Universal basic income. In this story, ordinary people are claimants.
Notice what the two stories have in common. In both of them, you don't do anything. The future is something that happens to you, and the only question is whether you get crushed by it or compensated for it. One story makes people victims, the other makes people dependents, and somehow these are the two visions on offer from the smartest people in the world.
We think there's a shortage of imagination here, and we'd like to add a third story. Not because it's the only alternative, but because we hope that once there are three stories, somebody will write a fourth.
Here is the third story: a million people making a million dollars each. Everyday people becoming owners of small businesses that serve communities they genuinely belong to. We've spent the last few years building Audos to make exactly this possible, and after watching thousands of people start companies, we no longer think of it as a prediction. It's more of a report.
The story hiding inside the optimist camp
Before we tell it, we have to deal with a third story that already exists, because the optimists have one, and we think it's a trap.
It's the one-person unicorn. Sam Altman floated it, the tech press loves it: one founder, an army of AI agents, a billion-dollar company. And honestly, it will probably happen. Maybe it already did.
But look at what we'd be celebrating. A billion dollars of value. One employee. Zero jobs created. The one-person unicorn isn't a triumph of technology, it's the logical endpoint of an economy that needs almost nobody. For twenty years the celebrated form of entrepreneurship has been the unicorn, and now the celebrated form is becoming a unicorn that employs no one. The question, as we invent the future, isn't whether one person CAN build a billion-dollar company. It's whether that's the thing we want to point our kids at.
We get the founders we celebrate. So let's look hard at who we've been celebrating, and who we've been ignoring.
A million TV channels
If you had said in 2004 that you were building a system to create a million TV channels, people would have called you crazy. Their mental model of a channel was the BBC: buildings, broadcast towers, thousands of staff. A million of those? Absurd.
Then YouTube happened, and it turned out a "channel" didn't need any of that. The result wasn't a million bad BBCs. It was an entirely new creative class nobody had imagined: vloggers, explainer nerds, restoration channels, a teenager in a bedroom out-rating prime time.
The same thing happened every time the tools of an industry got handed to ordinary people. Airbnb created a class of hospitality entrepreneurs who never could have financed a hotel. Shopify created millions of merchants who never could have leased a storefront. Roblox minted teenage game studios.
So when we say "a million new companies," it sounds like a stretch for exactly the same reason a million TV channels did. The mental model of a "company" is the corporation: offices, org charts, a legal department. But the cost of turning an idea into a working business has collapsed the way the cost of a TV channel collapsed, and when that happens, the unit changes. The company is getting its YouTube moment.
The backbone nobody celebrates
Here's the part that should make this feel less like a dream and more like a correction.
Small businesses already ARE the economy. They are 99.9% of all American firms, they employ nearly half of the private-sector workforce, they produce 43.5% of GDP [2]. Last year, almost 90% of net new American jobs (88.9%, to be exact) came from small businesses [3]. Americans know this in their bones: 86% say small businesses have a positive effect on the country. For large corporations, that number is 29% [4]. And money spent at an independent local business mostly stays in the community, $53 of every $100, versus about $14 at a chain [5].
The unicorn-only narrative isn't just limiting. It's statistically absurd.
The Germans, characteristically, have a word for what we're describing, and the fact that English doesn't is part of the problem. Mittelstand: the layer of small and midsize, mostly family-owned companies that Germany explicitly understands as the foundation of its economy and its identity. The Mittelstand is 99% of German companies and roughly 70% of German jobs, and it produces nearly half of the world's "hidden champions," the low-profile world leaders in narrow niches that Hermann Simon spent his career documenting [6]. Germany built an export superpower on businesses most people have never heard of, run by families who never sought a term sheet. A society organized around small ownership isn't a nostalgic fantasy. It's the most successful industrial economy in Europe.
We had a version of this once. The shopkeeper, the local printer, the family garage. Then for two decades we told one story about building things, the venture-scale story, and an entire generation learned that if your idea couldn't be a billion-dollar idea, it wasn't really an idea at all.
The return of the shopkeeper
The shopkeeper of the 1950s had something we've spent twenty years pretending doesn't matter: authenticity and authority inside a specific community. She knew her customers by name, knew what they needed before they asked, and they trusted her because she was one of them.
That, it turns out, is about to become the most valuable asset in business. When anyone can spin up a product, a website, a brand in an afternoon, execution stops being the moat. What's left is the relationship: do these people feel seen by you, do you actually belong to their community, have they given you permission to build the next thing for them. You can't prompt-engineer your way into being trusted by 20,000 people who know their own.
And 20,000 is roughly the right number. Robin Dunbar showed humans can maintain about 150 stable relationships [7]. Square it, 150 people who each trust you enough to vouch for you to their 150, and you get 22,500: small enough for real relationships, big enough for a real living. Kevin Kelly told creators they needed 1,000 true fans [8]. We think the next generation of founders gets 22,500.
We've watched this up close. Sarah, in Santa Monica, lost her father and found the entire post-loss world cold and utilitarian, so she built a business that helps families navigate grief. It will serve maybe 20,000 people and it is unmistakably her life's work. Matt, a weekend golfer in California, built a swing-analysis coach that passed a $100K run-rate in under two months. Beckett is sixteen, in Brooklyn; when his parents divorced he learned firsthand how broken the affordable-housing hunt is, so he and a friend built a tool that now helps New Yorkers every month.
None of these are billion-dollar ideas. All of them are somebody's life's work. Internally we call them DonkeyCorns: businesses that grind like mules and party as well as any unicorns. The portfolio version of the math is simple and a little subversive: a million people each building businesses like these is a trillion dollars of revenue, the same value as one decacorn, except it's held by a million households instead of one cap table.
And the desire is already there, measured and waiting. 61% of Americans have had a business idea. Only 8% ever followed through [9]. That gap used to be technical: you couldn't code, couldn't design, couldn't afford the agency. The thing that closed the gap is the same technology everyone is writing doom stories about. We find that detail almost funny.
The check and the Tuesday morning
Which brings us back to Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI answers the income question and ignores the meaning question. A job was never just a paycheck. It's identity, structure, status, the feeling of being needed by people you can name. The research on unemployment is brutally clear that the damage goes far beyond the lost wages. A check can replace your salary. Nothing about a check replaces your Tuesday morning.
So here is the line we'd put on the wall: the answer to UBI isn't a bigger check. It's smaller companies.
And societies have made this exact choice before, deliberately. When America had a continent of land to distribute, it didn't auction it to the largest plantations. The Homestead Act handed 270 million acres, ten percent of the country, to 1.6 million ordinary families, and that decision shaped the American character for a century [10]. When cheap American grain crashed Danish farming in the 1880s, a technology shock to the core industry of the country one of us grew up in, Denmark's answer wasn't compensation. It was the cooperative movement: turn peasants into co-owners of the dairies and slaughterhouses, educate them in folk high schools, and let ownership do the rest. That choice built modern Denmark [11].
Both times, a windfall arrived and a society chose distribution over concentration, ownership over transfers. The windfall arriving now is the largest one yet. The Homestead Act question is open again, and almost nobody is asking it.
Stories are infrastructure
Futures don't just happen. They get built out of what we fund, what we teach, and what we celebrate, and right now all three are pointed at the wrong story.
What we fund: venture capital works for maybe 1% of businesses, and we've let it become the only financing story in town. The other 99% need cash flow, not enterprise value, which means they need something closer to how record labels back artists than how VCs back founders.
What we teach: entrepreneurship education teaches exactly one flavor, raise a seed round, scale, exit, and never asks the only question that matters at Dunbar scale: who do you want to serve?
What we celebrate: there is no magazine cover for the woman with three $800K businesses and her name on the door. The movies got made about the unicorn founders, and a generation aimed itself accordingly. Changing the cover photo is not a soft intervention. Stories are infrastructure, as load-bearing as roads.
That's really why we wrote this. Not because a million people making a million dollars is the only good future, but because the two stories on offer, doom and dependency, both quietly assume that ordinary people have nothing left to contribute, and we have watched ten thousand ordinary people prove otherwise.
The doom story might come true. The UBI story might become necessary. But neither one is a story anyone wants to live in, and the strange, hopeful fact of this moment is that the future is unusually open to suggestions.
So consider this an invitation as much as an argument. Write the fourth story. We'd love to read it. And if your version also involves somebody's mom finally starting the thing she's been talking about for ten years, hit reply and tell us about her.
Henrik Werdelin and Nicholas Thorne are the co-founders of Audos and Prehype, where they have helped build companies including BarkBox and Ro. Audos helps everyday entrepreneurs start AI-powered businesses.
Sources
McKinsey Global Institute, "Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation," December 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages
SBA Office of Advocacy, "2024 Small Business Profile: United States," November 2024. https://advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/United_States.pdf
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics / SBA Office of Advocacy, 2024. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/small-businesses-contributed-55-percent-of-the-total-net-job-creation-from-2013-to-2023.htm
Pew Research Center, "Americans' views of small and large businesses, banks and technology companies," February 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/small-and-large-businesses-banks-and-technology-companies/
Civic Economics / American Independent Business Alliance, Indie Impact Study Series. https://amiba.net/local-multiplier/
Simon, H., "Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century," Springer, 2009; Asian Development Bank Institute, "The German Mittelstand - a model for Asia's emerging economies?", Asia Pathways, 2014. https://www.asiapathways-adbi.org/2014/06/the-german-mittelstand-a-model-for-asias-emerging-economies/
Dunbar, R.I.M., "Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16(4), 1993.
Kelly, K., "1,000 True Fans," The Technium, March 2008. https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
The Harris Poll for Zapier, "Why Americans Aren't Starting Businesses," December 2020. https://zapier.com/blog/potential-entrepreneurs-report/
US National Archives, "Homestead Act (1862)." https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/homestead-act
Danish cooperative movement (andelsbevægelsen), 1880s onward; see e.g. danmarkshistorien.dk, Aarhus University, "Andelsbevægelsen." https://danmarkshistorien.dk/vis/materiale/andelsbevaegelsen
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