The Flex Decade: Nobody's Building the Growth Team They Used To

I had a hunch before I had the data.

It came from a call last month. A B2B SaaS founder, mid-seven-figures ARR, told me he was about to open a req for a VP of Growth. Senior. Equity. The whole package. He'd convinced himself it was the responsible move — the thing a company his size was supposed to do. And about ten minutes in, walking me through why, he said the quiet part without noticing: "Honestly I don't even know what I'd have them do for the first six months."

He wasn't hiring a VP of Growth. He was hiring a feeling. The feeling that a company at his stage has a VP of Growth.

I've watched some version of that call enough times now that I went looking for whether the pattern shows up in the numbers. It does. And the shape of it is more interesting than the version most people are telling.

The story you've heard

The story going around is that AI is gutting growth teams. Fire the SDRs, the AI does outbound now. Cut the content team, the model writes the blog. There's a whole genre of it, and like most of that genre, it's half true in a way that's more misleading than a clean lie.

AI is part of this. But if you make AI the whole story, you miss that the rebalancing started before the AI tooling was good enough to matter, and it's driven by forces that have nothing to do with models. Treating AI as the cause is like crediting the umbrella for the rain stopping.

Here's what the data actually shows.

In-house growth teams are getting smaller. This part isn't ambiguous.

Three independent datasets, three different methodologies, same direction.

Revelio Labs tracked US startups and found median Series A headcount fell from 57 people in 2020 to around 44 by 2024 — while capital raised per employee more than doubled. More money, fewer bodies. They call it substituting capital for labor.

Carta, looking at its own cap-table data, found average Series B headcount dropped from 53 to 45 between the 2023 peak and 2025.

And ICONIQ — whose growth research is about as close to the source as you get for venture-backed SaaS — found the modern go-to-market org is running 20 to 30 percent leaner than it did five years ago. The number that stopped me: past roughly $100M ARR, the median company is now planning zero percent headcount growth in marketing and revenue operations. Not slower growth. Flat. ICONIQ's own read is that companies are using AI and outsourcing to absorb the work instead of hiring for it.

So the in-house growth team isn't disappearing. It's getting denser — fewer people, each expected to carry more, with the overflow pushed somewhere else.

The question worth asking is: pushed where.

The overflow has somewhere to go now

While full-time growth headcount flattened, the supply of senior operators willing to work in fractions exploded.

The cleanest number comes from Harvard Business Review. Two researchers manually counted people describing themselves as "fractional leaders" on LinkedIn: roughly 2,000 in 2022, around 110,000 by early 2024. That's not a market report with a methodology to pick apart — it's two people running a search twice, two years apart, and finding a fifty-fold jump. Crude, and exactly because it's crude, hard to argue with.

The demand side moved with it. A fintech executive-search firm in Europe told Sifted it had seen roughly a 25 percent rise in startups looking for fractional hires year over year, and was blunt about why: founders are trying to stretch funding further. In the US, the count of fractional sales leaders roughly doubled between 2020 and 2024. In the UK, the infrastructure is maturing — platforms matching fractional operators to companies are raising real money and landing on growth lists.

I want to be honest about the rest of the numbers, because most of them are garbage, and noticing that they're garbage is part of the point.

If you go looking, you'll find the fractional market confidently sized at "$5.7 billion, growing 14 percent a year," or projected to hit "$24.7 billion by 2034." You'll find a stat that "Gartner predicts 30 percent of midsize enterprises will have a fractional executive on retainer by 2027." I chased those down. The market-size figures trace back to vendor marketing and a report mill that couldn't even spell the category right in its own title. The Gartner stat appears to be invented — there's no such report. It's a number that got repeated until it sounded real.

I'm flagging this because the fractional space is drowning in self-interested data, and I'm about as self-interested a narrator as you'll find on this topic. So here's the deal: I'll only lean on numbers that come from people with no reason to inflate them — HBR, the headcount data from cap-table firms, the funding data. Everything that smells like a brochure, I'll tell you it smells like a brochure.

Why this is happening — and it's mostly not AI

Strip out the AI hype and you're left with five things, none of them new, all of them compounding.

Money got expensive and runway got short. SVB found most startups watched their runway shrink last year; median US tech runway dropped to about twelve months, the tightest since 2019. When a board ties every hire to a milestone, a fixed senior salary plus equity plus the cost of being wrong looks very different from a scoped engagement you can end in a quarter. Capital efficiency isn't a vibe anymore. It's the whole operating model.

The operators showed up. A decade of tech layoffs and a generation of senior people who'd rather have four clients than one boss created a supply of experienced talent that simply didn't exist at this scale before. The best of them aren't doing this as a fallback between "real" jobs. They're doing it on purpose.

Remote work made the math work. A fractional leader can be inside one company's strategy at 10am and another's at 11. That was logistically absurd in 2018. It's normal now.

A wrong senior hire is brutal. Six to twelve months of salary, plus severance, plus the lost time, plus the morale hit, plus the searching-again. Founders have done that math the hard way and don't want to do it again before they know what the role even is. (See: the founder hiring a feeling.)

And the work is increasingly stage-specific. What a company needs to break through a particular ceiling is rarely a permanent function. It's a specific read, applied fast, then handed off. You don't keep a cardiac surgeon on staff for the rest of your life because you needed one once.

AI sits on top of all five and makes the "fewer people, more output" math even easier. It's real. It's just the sixth thing, not the first.

The part where I argue against myself

Here's where I'd lose you if I oversold it, so I won't.

The fractional model breaks in specific, predictable ways. Companies outgrow it — when a function moves from "needs a sharp read" to "needs daily ownership," the fraction has to become a whole person, and pretending otherwise is how you stall. Investors often push for full-time leadership to de-risk, and they're frequently right. And there's a real quality problem: the same boom that produced 110,000 fractional leaders also produced a lot of people who were a content manager on Tuesday and a "fractional CMO" on Wednesday. The category has its share of people selling a title they can't back.

The fair version of the skeptic's case is this: a wave of operators got displaced or bored, rebranded as fractional, and is now talking its own book about how indispensable the model is. That's not nothing. It's partly true. I'd be lying if I said I was standing outside it.

And in one place, the "AI replaces it" story is just correct. In commodity execution — content churn, basic SEO, ad ops — AI genuinely is substituting for the agency, not amplifying anybody. Forrester is forecasting agency job cuts in the double digits. A survey of marketing leaders found most are already spending less on agencies because of AI. If your work is the kind of thing a model can do at midnight for free, the model is coming for it, and no amount of "amplification, not replacement" framing changes that.

!pullquote AI is eating the execution layer, and the price of judgment is going up.

So the honest line isn't "fractional and advisory always win." It's narrower, and it holds: AI is eating the execution layer, and the price of judgment is going up. The work that survives — in-house or fractional — is the work AI makes more valuable by making everything around it cheaper. Knowing which problem to solve first. Reading the constraint nobody inside the company can see anymore because they've been staring at it too long. Deciding what to ignore. That doesn't get automated. It gets more expensive, because now it's the only part that's scarce.

What the founder was actually missing

The founder with the VP-of-Growth req didn't have a hiring problem. He had a sequencing problem he was about to solve by spending $300k a year on it.

He didn't need a full-time growth leader and he didn't need a fractional one instead. Those were never the two options. The two options were figure out what has to be true before that hire makes sense — or hire the feeling and find out in eight months that the role had nothing to do.

That's the thing the in-house-versus-advisory framing gets wrong from the start. It's not a versus. The companies building the best growth engines right now aren't picking a side. They're keeping a tight core of people who own the thing day to day, and bringing in outside reads at the moments where being wrong is most expensive — the inflection points, the ceilings, the bets they can't afford to make on a hunch.

Core plus flex. Not one or the other.

He paused the req, by the way. We'll see what he does. The interesting part isn't whether he hires someone — it's that he almost spent a year of runway answering a question he hadn't asked yet.

The data in this piece comes from Revelio Labs, Carta, ICONIQ, Harvard Business Review, SVB, Sifted, and Forrester; the parts that don't have a source named are the parts I couldn't verify, and I left them out.