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Cannon: Outset abandons standard engineering pods for two-week project swarms

Aaron Cannon · How AI Agents Are Transforming This $140 Billion Industry · Joe Lonsdale · Jul 2, 2026 · at 34:42

Aaron Cannon, co-founder of Outset, explains how his startup minimizes management and organizational overhead as engineering headcount grows.

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“And so, like, you know, we, for example, we, we've got, you know, more than 25 engineers. Like, historically, you put them into pods, and those pods are very structured, and they're focused on different things, and they're, like, suddenly you've got this kind of, like, bureaucratic overhead. We're like, well, which pod, and who's leading the pod? And like, we don't do that, right? It's like, we have the projects that matter for the next two weeks, and people swarm to it.”

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