What do you mean?
So, let's say this is 1980 and you start a new business.
You'll need a personal assistant/secretary to :
- type and post letters
- sort and manage incoming letters
- perform basic book keeping tasks
- arrange appointments
- answer phones
- book travel
You'll need an accountant to :
- manage more complex book keeping
- apply for small business loans
- arrange yearly reports
You'll need a lawyer to :
- handle daily legal issues
- write simple contracts
You'll need an entire room full of sales people to
- perform business development tasks
- call every number in the phone book
- manage and maintain customer indexes
You'll need a "copy boy" to
- run errands
- copy things
- distribute mail
Etc...
Now in 2018
You'll need
- an app for your phone to scan receipts into your accounting software
- an accounting app to perform year end reports and to manage your bank accounts
- an app to click together legal documents based on a wizard
- a customer relationship manager application
- a web site service for your home page
- etc...
Let's imagine you are a lawyer in 1980...
- You'd study law
- Graduate
- Take a junior position doing shit work
- Pass the bar
- work for years taking your boss's shitty customers
- work for years trying to sell your body to get your own customers
- one your portfolio was big enough, you'd become a senior partner who would take a cut from everyone else's customers.
The reason the senior lawyer hired junior lawyers was because there was a massive amount of work to do and a senior partner would spend most of their time talking and delegating the actual work to a team of juniors, researchers and paralegals.
Now the senior can do 95% of the work themselves by using an iPad with research and contract software installed in less time than it would have taken to delegate. So where a law firm may have employed 10-20 juniors, paralegals and researchers in 1980 per senior, today, one junior lawyer probably can easily handle the work placed on them by two seniors.
There's no point hiring tons of people anymore. Creating a startup that is dependent on a head count is suicide from the beginning. If you're a people based company, then the second someone smarter sees there's a profit to be made, they'll open the same type of business with far more automated.