[vallode]

I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions.

I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".

The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.

Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).