From the first day I started building Spare, one question has shaped almost everything I do: how do we move faster?
Long before AI, we spent countless hours on it. Many of the changes looked small from the outside. We put all of our code in a single monorepo. We used TypeScript across the entire stack: back end, front end, and mobile. And we deliberately kept our resources tight, so we were forced to prioritize, cut scope, and do the most efficient thing rather than everything at once.
None of these decisions was dramatic on its own. Together, they let a small team move like a much bigger one. Finding efficiency in how we work has been the most important part of my job since day one.
Over 11 years of building Spare, from the first line of code to a post-Series B company, I've seen the same lesson play out again and again: the biggest results rarely come from working harder. They come from leverage.
Leverage beats effort
Effort scales linearly. Work twice as many hours and, on a good day, you get twice as much done. Leverage doesn't work that way. The right system or the right tool can multiply what a person produces by ten or a hundred.
The other default answer is hiring. When a team falls behind, the instinct is to add people. But more people is rarely the clean fix it looks like. Every new person means more management, more complexity, and more places for communication to break down. A bigger team is often harder to work with, not easier, and it rarely gets proportionally more done. That's why I've always looked for ways to make a small team more effective before making it bigger.
Most of my job as a CTO has been finding leverage: deciding what to build and what to buy, designing systems so a small team could support a growing business, and creating the conditions for good people to do their best work. Using one language everywhere meant any engineer could ship across the whole product. Tight constraints meant we spent our hours on what mattered most. Small decisions, outsized returns.
AI is the biggest shift in leverage I've seen
I've lived through cloud, mobile, and the rise of no-code tools. Each one changed what a small team could do. AI is different in scale. For the first time, leverage is available not just to engineers but to anyone who can describe clearly what they want.
A technical founder can now ship in a weekend what used to take a quarter. A non-technical founder can prototype a product, automate operations, and analyze data without waiting on an engineering team. The cost of trying an idea has collapsed.
What most people get wrong
Most of what I read about AI falls into two buckets: hype about what it might do someday, and lists of tools to try this week. Neither helps much.
The founders getting real results aren't the ones with the longest list of subscriptions. They're the ones who rethink how work gets done. They ask which parts of the job only a human should do, and redesign everything else around that. The leverage isn't in the tool. It's in the judgment about where to apply it.
That's also why the line between "technical" and "non-technical" founders matters less every month. What matters now is clear thinking, good taste, and the willingness to experiment.
What The Leveraged Mind will be
This is where I'll share what I'm learning, in three kinds of posts:
Build: hands-on guides to the tools and workflows that actually work, tested on real projects.
Operate: strategy for running and scaling a company when AI changes what a small team can do.
Field Notes: what I'm building and learning in public, including the experiments that fail.
I'll write for both sides of the stack. If you write code, you'll get depth. If you don't, you'll get clarity without the jargon. Either way, I'll be honest about what works, what doesn't, and what's overhyped.
New posts every week, free.
One ask
Hit reply and tell me: what's one thing you wish AI could do for your work right now? I read every response, and your answers will shape what I write next.
If you know a founder who'd find this useful, I'd be grateful if you shared it with them.
Alexey