Silicon Valley is bragging about staying small, and somehow that counts as news.
The Wall Street Journal reports that median head count at Series A startups fell from about 57 employees in 2020 to about 44 in 2024. There is now a leaderboard, the Top Lean AI Native Companies, tracking startups pulling more than five million dollars in annual recurring revenue with fewer than 50 people. Appearing on it has become a status symbol. Founders are proud of this. Venture capitalists are praising it.
Independent funeral homes have been running lean for decades. The difference is that for you, small was a constraint. AI is turning that same constraint into a position.
Worth noting: the leaders in that piece are not removing people everywhere. Burkay Gur, CEO of Fal, grew his team from six to 80 people over five years and stopped optimizing at exactly one place: sales and relationships. His words were specific. “We realized that you actually need people building those relationships, executing those deals.” He also admitted that stretching the team too thin hurt the work and hurt the business. And, of course, I would agree. As a long-time and experienced and passionate salesperson I am confident that AI will not soon replace me in the boardroom.
Funeral service drew that line a long time ago. The arrangement conference has always been human space. A family starts telling a story halfway through, the whole service shifts, and you caught it because you were in the room. No process ran that moment. No software tool stole your mojo.
Owning AI tools is not the same as running a system. Barron’s, citing Ramp data, reports that more than half of U.S. companies pay for some kind of AI subscription, but the median firm spent under thirteen dollars per worker in August. A login is not infrastructure. That goes for all your technology.
So draw the line. Automate the follow-up call, the scheduling confirmation, the database content, the administrative processing. Protect the arrangement conference, the aftercare call, the preneed conversation, and the community relationships that took fifteen years to build. Then put the whole policy and strategy on one page for your company: which tools staff may use, what never goes into them, and who reviews anything that goes out under your name.
Which parts of your operation need a person in the room, and which parts are consuming a person who should be there? I would be asking this question regularly. Things are changing very fast.
-John