Meta's marketing chief predicts the next Instagram could be run by one person
He says finance could be mostly handled by AI, and rising efficiency makes a solo giant hard to avoid.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational LeaderMeta chief marketing officer Alex Schultz was laying out why he expects artificial intelligence to keep improving over the next two years. Larger training systems spread across data centers, better chips from suppliers like Nvidia, and research advances that have not yet been fully exploited all point toward more performance and more efficiency, in his view.
Then he offered his prediction. "I don't see why there won't be the next Instagram that's one person and gets to tens of millions of active users," he said. "In fact, I think it's inevitable."
His model was Instagram itself. When the photo sharing app reached tens of millions of users, it employed just seven people, Schultz said. He added that many public AI breakthroughs have not yet been exploited to the maximum, leaving what he sees as huge upside ahead.
In some areas, he argued, a single founder could now go further by outsourcing work and letting AI handle much of the load. Finance, he said, could be mostly handled by AI, with a solo founder supported by AI tools rather than by a staff.
As an early sign, he cited partners of the host on a recent newscast, in his account of their remarks. In his account, they now handled most of their legal work on their own with AI help and then put what he called three correct questions to the law firm that supports them. He said they had "scaled themselves an entire in-house legal department with GPT."
Schultz also stated the limit to his idea. If AI hits a plateau, he said, the one person giant might not arrive in our lifetimes. His bet is that rising efficiency makes it hard to avoid. One tiny team already showed how far seven people could go. The next test is one.
Questions people ask
Has a one-person business ever reached millions of users before?
Yes, though not at Instagram scale. Small apps and newsletters with millions of readers have been run by a handful of people, and independent game developers and app makers have reached millions of downloads alone by using app stores, cloud computing, and payment platforms to outsource distribution and infrastructure.
What jobs would a one-person company hand to AI first?
Routine back-office work tends to go first. Bookkeeping, customer support replies, basic legal drafting, and marketing variations are already easy to automate, while work that requires trust, judgment, or in-person presence, like enterprise sales and specialized engineering, is harder to hand off.
Why was Instagram able to stay so small?
It stayed tiny by design and by timing. The founders focused only on a simple photo app for phones, and they relied on cloud services and Apple's app store for hosting, distribution, and payments instead of building those systems themselves. Meta bought the company in 2012 when it had about a dozen employees.