Surya wants to be small. It’s a cute look. He stood on stage last week, palms open, leaning into the microphone like he was sharing a secret with a thousand of his closest VC friends. "I want those small, small partnerships," he said. The crowd nodded, their fleece vests rustling in unison. It was a masterclass in corporate theater.
For years, the playbook for a guy like Surya—the kind of executive who measures success in data centers and sovereign-wealth-sized budgets—was simple: buy everything. If it has a pulse and an API, write a check. But the Department of Justice and the EU’s antitrust hawks have ruined the fun. They’ve turned "acquisition" into a dirty word. So, Surya is pivoting. He’s gone minimalist. He’s Marie Kondo-ing his balance sheet, keeping only the startups that spark joy and, more importantly, don’t trigger a three-year federal investigation.
This isn’t about being humble. It’s about plumbing.
When Surya talks about "small partnerships," he isn’t looking for a buddy to grab coffee with. He’s looking for a way to strip-mine a startup’s talent without the headache of a merger. We’ve seen this movie before. Look at the $650 million "licensing fee" his peers recently paid to gut a high-profile AI lab. They didn’t buy the company. They just hired every single employee who knew where the "on" switch was and paid a "fee" to the leftover shell. It’s a legal loophole big enough to drive a server rack through.
The friction here is obvious, even if the PR teams try to sand it down. These "small" deals are a nightmare for the founders who actually want to build something lasting. You take Surya’s money, you take his cloud credits, and you sign a deal that looks like a partnership but feels like an organ transplant. You give up your independence for the privilege of being a feature in his next quarterly earnings call. The trade-off is simple: you get to stay alive, but you don't get to keep your soul. Or your IP.
It’s a cynical play for a cynical era. The regulators are still fighting the last war, looking for traditional monopolies while the big players are busy building "ecosystems" out of these micro-deals. It’s harder to sue someone for having fifty friends than it is for owning one giant subsidiary. Surya knows this. He’s figured out that if you fragment your dominance, it’s a lot harder to track. It’s the "death by a thousand papercuts" strategy, except Surya is the one holding the paper.
The price tag for these "small" vibes is actually quite steep. We’re talking about billions of dollars in cloud compute credits—monopoly money that only exists within Surya’s own servers—exchanged for real-world engineering hours. It’s a closed loop. The startup gets "scale," and Surya gets to ensure that nobody else can use that startup’s tech. It’s brilliant. It’s also exhausting.
The tech press loves to talk about the "democratization" of the industry. We love a David and Goliath story. But Surya has figured out a way to make Goliath look like a collection of very well-funded Davids. By keeping the partnerships small, he keeps the optics clean. No messy integration. No awkward cultural clashes. Just a steady stream of "collaborations" that all somehow end with the smaller partner becoming entirely dependent on Surya’s infrastructure.
If you’re a founder today, Surya’s "small" approach is the only game in town. The IPO market is a graveyard. The big exits are blocked by the FTC. So you take the small partnership. You take the "strategic investment." You tell your board it’s a win. But you know that the moment you stop being useful, or the moment a bigger "small" partner comes along, the credits will dry up.
Surya finished his speech with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He wants to be a partner. He wants to be a collaborator. He wants to be the wind beneath a thousand tiny wings. It’s a lovely sentiment for a man who owns the air everyone else is trying to breathe.
How many "small" partnerships does it take to build a wall that no one can climb?