Do Things That Don't Scale, At Scale

PG’s saying of “do things that don’t scale” has always stayed with me throughout my startup journey for the last 10+ years. It worked wonders to optimize for rapid validation, and to go above and beyond to deliver delight.

But somewhere along that startup journey, that mentality gives way to actually scaling. Founder led sales gave way to auto dialers. Deep relationships with customers gave way to Jira. If you are lucky, you have a team that tried to not lose the human touch; most companies aren’t so lucky. And then customers stop to care about you as much. You become “yet another tool”.

Now, what if all of this can change with AI? My (perhaps contrarian) belief is that AI can keep on doing things that don’t scale, ad infinitum. And do it well. Even with today’s models (with much better harnesses). Perhaps even better than humans can.

Garry gave a wonderful talk a couple weeks ago at AI Engineer in SF, that I thought beautifully captured the AI-native spirit of 2026. I love what he said: go boil the ocean you were told not to boil. What would you do with infinite intelligence at your fingertips?

There’s incredible alpha today in boiling the ocean. Hyper personalize every interaction using an overwhelming amount of context, and doing it intentionally and thoughtfully. The data is out there already; it’s actually been for years. But it was never economically feasible to actually put intelligence (ie human attention) to make the personalization worth it. Now, we can design systems to make this happen; it’s now a context engineering problem. The company that can make a user feel like the hero is going to win.

Some examples: Do account-based GTM for the $1k customer, not just the $100k one. Provide support for a customer, by analyzing the entirety of their support history and product usage history. Respond to every single customer feedback, and follow up with each customer when their requested feature ships. Demo your product, with environments already pre-created for each prospect.

What an exciting time! Go make people feel like heroes.