Near Zero Labs
A firm for the company you would build today

You are running
yesterday's company.

The two maps every company runs on — the technology map and the people map — were both redrawn while you were running the one you have. We rebuild them together, at the pace AI actually moves.

Request a briefing Read the thesis
Capability Audit
Every engagement begins here
Two weeks
To your readout
Any size
Startup to enterprise
The company you have
300
people
The company you would build today
60
A+ humans, each doing what only humans can
Same output
3×
the margin, the speed, the compounding
A composite from a recent rebuild. Fewer humans, but each of them exceptional — supported by software that carries the rest. The ratios hold at 30 people and 3,000; the direction is the same at every size.
01  ·  The thesis

Every company is really two companies stacked on top of each other.

The first is a technology map: the software, data, and systems that run the business. The second is a people map: the humans who sit around that software and make it move.

Both were drawn in a world where humans did the work that AI can now do. Both are still in place. And when a technology stops being what it was, the shape of the company built to run it stops being right too.

The companies we work with have the advantage of not having to guess what's coming. They can see, from their own numbers, that growth now costs more people than it should. That every new hire's job description reads like a workaround for software that should already know. That the shape of the org chart is a record of decisions made when the maps looked different.

You cannot get to the company you would build today by adding to the one you have. It has to be rebuilt — around better software and around fewer, better humans.

02  ·  The two maps

Both maps have been redrawn. Together.

Fixing one without the other is why every AI transformation you've watched has underdelivered. New software on the old org chart just makes the old org chart faster at the wrong things. A new org chart on the old software just makes fewer people do the same broken work.

Map 1

The Technology Map

What the software knows, decides, and does on its own.

Then
Now
Forms and queues for humans to fill in
Agents that own outcomes end to end
A schema optimized for reporting
A schema optimized for reasoning
Thousands of hand-coded rules
Models and guardrails, versioned like code
Point-to-point integrations, maintained by hand
Tool-using agents, self-healing and observable
Map 2

The People Map

What the humans in your company are actually paid to decide.

Then
Now
Specialists who feed the software
A+ operators who direct the agents
Managers of managers of managers
One layer between the CEO and the work
Functions defined by process
Roles defined by outcome
Growth priced in headcount
Growth priced in leverage
A quiet observation

Most executives we meet already know one of the maps is wrong. Very few have noticed that the other one is wrong for the same reason.

03  ·  Who this is for

Three CEOs who tend to find us first.

Size doesn't decide whether this works — posture does. The companies that get the most from us tend to recognize themselves in one of these three descriptions, whether they are a five-person startup or a five-thousand-person enterprise.

i.

The inherited operator

You didn't build the company you're running. You inherited it — from a founder, from a private-equity thesis, from a decade of well-intentioned growth. It works. It also feels like it costs too much to work.

You are here when: every plan asks for more people, and you're not sure that's the right lever anymore.
ii.

The scaling operator

You're several times bigger than when you started, and the math on adding more people to keep the same growth going has stopped making sense to you. You suspect the next chapter isn't the same company, just larger.

You are here when: you're privately certain a smaller, sharper team would out-execute the one you have.
iii.

The board-facing CEO

You have a board, an investor group, or a founding team that keeps asking about "AI strategy" and you keep answering with a slide none of you finds convincing. What you actually want is a real answer, from people who have built the systems, not the decks.

You are here when: your engineering leader is capable, but this is not the kind of rebuild they've done before.
04  ·  Engagements

Three ways to work together.

Every engagement begins with the Blueprint. It is how we — and your leadership team — arrive at a shared understanding of what is possible before anyone commits to a rebuild. From there, most companies continue into The Rebuild or a Residency; some don't, and that's a fair outcome too.

Every engagement starts here
01
Blueprint
30 days · fixed fee, from $50,000

A 30-day, executive-led diagnostic. A leadership team cannot have a strategy for AI without a shared understanding of what is possible — the Blueprint builds that understanding first, then maps your current technology and current org against the company you would build today. You leave with an aligned executive team, two maps, a rebuild sequence, and a defensible number on what it costs and what it returns.

  • Executive working sessions to align on what AI actually makes possible
  • Full audit of the technology map, layer by layer
  • Full audit of the people map, role by role
  • 90-day rebuild sequence ranked by ROI
  • Board-ready readout, delivered in person
The only door into a Rebuild or a Residency.
02
The Rebuild
6–12 weeks · milestone-based, $185K–$1.5M+

A senior team from Near Zero rewrites the core software and redesigns the team that runs it. The rebuild is in your production environment, run by your name at the top of the change log. Alongside the software, we train your existing team to work with AI, not fear it — so the people you already have become the operators of the new stack. We leave when they can run it without us.

  • Production rewrite of one to three core systems
  • Agent architecture, guardrails, observability
  • Redesigned roles and workflows for the new stack
  • Hands-on training that turns your team into confident AI operators
  • Live migration and complete handoff
For companies ready to redraw both maps at once.
03
Residency
6 months · retainer, from $35,000 / month

A senior engineer and an org architect embedded inside your executive team. They keep the two maps evolving in real time — refactoring the stack, reshaping the org, and coaching your leaders and their teams to own the redesign after we leave.

  • Embedded senior engineer and org architect
  • Continuous rewrites and role redesigns
  • Ongoing team enablement so AI fluency compounds internally
  • Weekly reviews with the founding partners
  • Quarterly on-site working sessions
For CEOs who want a partner, not a report.
05  ·  The team

The team is why this works.

Redrawing both maps at once takes a rare kind of professional — someone who can rewrite production software and, in the next meeting, redesign the org chart it runs on, in front of a board.

Every engagement is staffed by senior operators who could be principal engineers, founding CTOs, or COOs anywhere they wanted to be. Most of them already have been. No juniors. No offshore pods. No learning on your budget.

12+
Years median engineering experience
100%
Senior. Every seat, every engagement.
3–5
Operators per engagement — never more
Zero
Handoffs to a separate delivery team
We are not selling AI. We are selling the company you would build if you were starting today, knowing what's coming. It happens to require AI. It requires a different org chart just as much.
The founding partners
Near Zero Labs
06  ·  Patterns from the work

What the rebuild looks like in practice.

Composite outcomes from the last few engagements. Industries and specifics are held back at our clients' request. The pattern is not.

Tickets answered in days → Answered in seconds
Customer experience

Supervised agents resolve most inbound at first touch. The senior humans on the team spend their day on the edge cases only they can solve.

Pipeline built by hand → Pipeline that builds itself
Revenue

Sourcing, enrichment, and outbound run continuously in the background. Account executives spend their time in conversations, not in a CRM.

Weekly board packs → Real-time board room
Finance

Variance, runway, and cohort analysis produced on demand by an agent chain reading directly from the ledger. The CFO reviews, doesn't assemble.

Screening interviews → Only the ones that matter
Recruiting

A persistent recruiting agent sources, ranks, screens, and schedules. Your people show up for the conversations that decide the hire.

Campaigns in quarters → Campaigns in days
Marketing

Production, distribution, and analytics run end-to-end. A creative director sets the direction; the system executes across every channel.

Reports that ask for context → Decisions with context built in
Operations

Middle-layer decision support the operators actually trust. Data reaches the people who use it in the form they need, when they need it.

07  ·  Request a briefing

A 30-minute conversation.
No deck.

Every application is screened immediately. If your company is a fit, a booking link for a conversation with a founding partner lands in your inbox within five minutes. If it isn't, you'll still hear back — with a short note on why.

  • No RFPs. No procurement templates.
  • A paragraph in your own words is plenty.
  • Every engagement starts with a Capability Audit — not a proposal.
We treat every message in confidence. No lists, no follow-up sequences.
A closing thought
The company  you would build today.
Built for you. Fewer humans, and every one of them A+.