# The biggest gap between startups and enterprise we've ever had (slim)

> Vlad Cealicu on why the gap between startups building with Opus 5.5 level models and enterprises is the biggest there has been, why it will take years to show, and why engineers should start their own thing now.

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By Vlad Cealicu, 9 November 2026. 696 words, about 3 min to read.

I think the gap between startups working with Opus 5.5 level models and enterprises is the biggest gap between startups and enterprise that we have ever had.

## Why big companies move slowly

Enterprises have always had to be more risk averse.

On top of that add the bigger org, the processes around it and more people to update.

Every pair of people is a line someone has to keep up to date

| Team | People | Lines of communication |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The two of us | 2 | 1 |
| A team of 10 | 10 | 45 |
| 50 engineers | 50 | 1,225 |

Every pair of people is one line, n(n-1)/2 of them.

And on top of that there's shareholder value and the enshittification of the product, which is why they lost money to gain market share, so they could squeeze later.

## What changed

What I've noticed, working on both sides, is that the gap between enterprise and startups has been getting bigger and bigger.

What has changed even more in the last year is that you can build it much better, and at that fraction of the cost.

- 3M: page views since launch on 25 September
- 200k: page views a day
- 2: of us building it

Anchor Terminal, 9 November 2026

This won't be seen for a few more years, while licences run out and companies die, but it will be a big shift to smaller tech companies, companies with fewer than 50 engineers that are winning their space.

## Start now

So my advice is to find your niche, do that thing you're passionate about and see it blossom and grow.

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More in [Opinion](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/opinion/index.md) · Older opinion [A machine that builds the next machine, and a report that landed before the roadshow](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-builds-the-next-machine.md)

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## References

Read on 9 November 2026.

[1] Wikipedia, The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton M.

[2] Wikipedia, The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks, Addison-Wesley, 1975).

[3] Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, Tiktok's enshittification, 21 January 2023. Source for the three stages of platform decay.

[4] CX Today, Microsoft CEO, AI Agents Will Transform SaaS as We Know It.

[5] Fortune, Beatrice Nolan, Anthropic's Claude triggered a trillion-dollar selloff.

[6] Anchor Terminal's own request records, page views of every kind (people, agents and crawlers) since the site started, and the daily rate, as of 9 November 2026. Not published in full; what the records keep is on the privacy page.

[7] Oracle, Oracle Announces Record Q4 and FY 2026 Results Driven by Cloud Infrastructure & Cloud Applications, 10 June 2026. Source for fiscal 2026 total revenues of $67.4 billion, cloud revenues of $34.0 billion and software revenues of $24.5 billion.

[8] Second Talent, tech layoffs statistics, September 2026, a tally of the layoffs.fyi database.