We said no to customers who wanted to pay us

It felt insane at the time, especially for those outside. It was the most disciplined thing we did.

I spent seven years there, 2014 to 2020, and the business grew about 15x while I was inside it. The story everyone tells about that era is a story of abundance: the money, the curve, the ping-pong tables. The story I actually lived was the opposite. We were always stretched. Never enough people, never enough hours, never enough attention to go around.

That scarcity was not a problem to be solved. It was the engine.

Scarcity plus drive

Here is the part most people get wrong. Scarcity on its own is just stagnation, a small company staying small. Drive on its own is just bloat, a well-funded team doing ten things badly. Scarcity plus drive is the rare combination that actually compounds. One forces the focus. The other refuses to let the focus become an excuse.

Being short on everything, and refusing to lower the ambition to match, forced six habits I have never unlearned.

It made us say no far more than we said yes. When you cannot serve everyone, you have to choose who you serve, and, harder, who you do not. Turning away a paying customer is not arrogance. It is the clearest signal a company can send about what it is actually for. Every yes we gave away would have cost us the focus that made the next yes worth anything.

It made us creative instead of expensive. With no budget to brute-force a target, you find the odd path to it: the partnership, the reframe, the small hack that does the work of ten hires. Constraints do not lower your ambition. They raise your ingenuity until it is tall enough to reach the ambition anyway.

It made us obsessed with hiring people better than ourselves. When you cannot hire an army, every seat has to be exceptional. The rule was simple and a little uncomfortable: hire someone better than you. Not a safe pair of hands. Not an executor to do what you say. Someone who makes you look up. Armies of executors are what you build when you have money to waste. A tiny team of people better than you is what you build when you do not.

It made us fix the destination and float the route. The objective was precise and non-negotiable. The path to it was entirely up for grabs. A hard target and a soft method is what lets a small team move fast, because nobody is waiting for permission on the how.

It made us reassess constantly. Are we even chasing the right target? Is this still the best way to reach it? We asked those questions weekly, not annually. The long-term goal never moved. Everything in service of it stayed under permanent review. Scarcity does not let you fall in love with a plan. It makes you fall in love with the outcome.

And it made us absurdly productive. In 2014, Facebook did about $12.5 billion in revenue with roughly 9,200 people. That is around $1.35 million of revenue per employee: six to seven times the average large company, and still about 12% ahead of Google, the most efficient of our direct rivals. We were not working with more. We were working with less, and wringing more out of it.

None of this happened because we were smarter than everyone else. It happened because we were constrained, and we would not let the constraint shrink the goal. Take the constraint away and most of those habits quietly rot. Give a team infinite runway and it will find infinite ways to look busy.

The same lesson, on the other side

Which is exactly why I think about scarcity so much now, from the other end of a career.

I build solo today. JobMentis is mostly one person and a lot of AI carrying the execution. And here is what nobody warns you about building in 2026: the tools make resources feel infinite. Compute is cheap. A model will write you a thousand lines before lunch. It is very easy to feel rich.

It is a trap. The abundance is real, and it will happily let you do ten mediocre things at once.

So I do the opposite of what the abundance invites. I keep the team at one, on purpose. I say no to features, to customers, to whole directions, far more than I say yes. When I bring someone in, it is only someone better than me at the thing. I fix the objective and stay loose on the path. I treat scarcity not as the phase I am trying to escape by raising a round, but as the discipline that made the best company I ever worked at what it became.

For a solo founder, scarcity is not the humble beginning you apologise for. It is the value that makes the building possible.

The strangest thing an ambitious person can do

Abundance feels like the goal. Most of the time it is the anaesthetic. It numbs the exact instincts that got you moving.

If you have a real constraint right now, do not resent it. Use it. It is doing work for you that no amount of money can buy.

And if you do not have one, if the funding and the tools have made everything feel easy, you may have to do the strangest thing an ambitious person can do.

Manufacture the scarcity yourself.