@paul March 25, 2026, 10:51am

I've had this thought rolling around my mind for a while: I'd rather 100,000 small companies with 6 employees than 6 companies with 100,000 employees.

But it feels a bit pithy when I interrogate it internally, but it also presents in my mind as self-evidently better. But is it a case that I'm looking for the "big" things: compute, distribution, power etc. to be public domain, and that small companies would plug in to them?

11 replies

Jonathan Markwell March 25, 2026, 11:50am
Similarly I’d rather 1,000 companies make it to £1 million revenue than one gets to £1 billion.
jamie March 25, 2026, 1:04pm
I think it’s logical: less risk of major societal effects due to layoffs, concentration of wealth & power, dependency, and more functional competition in markets. I also think smaller companies are most efficient. Downside is that some problems require a scale I don’t enjoy
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 1:05pm
Right!
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 1:07pm
I think my suggestion is that beyond a certain scale, then things should become utilities. As far as I can tell, privatisation of utilities is completely stupid and rather than driving prices, it makes life more complicated and frustrating.
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 1:16pm
Also: "some problems require a scale" I feel is a spectrum. Some companies have applied scale where maybe scale isn't necessary. A good example is email: instead of innovating ways to make keep it distributed, big companies innovated ways to silo at massive scale.
jamie March 25, 2026, 1:36pm
Absolutely. The examples in my head were things like car manufacturing, electricity generation & distribution, shipping, etc. Also banking, insurance etc. Basically anything with large capital requirements.
jamie March 25, 2026, 1:36pm
It makes me wildly uncomfortable though to think they might be better as utilities given the state of large government projects/depts. Some things should rise to the level of a strategic national utilities (I’d put broadband and electricity back in that bucket) but don’t want an Irish Car Company!
jamie March 25, 2026, 1:36pm
In tech specifically, I think AI is a strategic good which should not be centralised in a corporate entity especially as I think it unlocks the dismantling of Big Tech / concentration of tech workers in larger tech companies
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 2:04pm
Yeah, real-estate too. They all feel like things that could work as cooperatives given enough will. I wasn't able to quickly swap the battery of my car recently because BMW use some proprietary shit in the hood design. Fuck that! And that's how _all_ cars are going because they've been let away.
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 2:06pm
But what if all the components were available to local retailers, and e.g. QA was a national utility. I'm totally dream-lining here, but also I feel like most people should have bikes or quads instead of cars and infrastructure should shift to accommodate that.
Paul Campbell March 25, 2026, 2:08pm
There are so many layers of shittiness propping up the AI boom, that _could_ have been strategically implemented as public good: - carbon neutral datacentres - co-ordinated training in the public domain - listening to critics! - emphasis on enabling small teams rather than taking jobs