How Small Firms Beat Big Ones

James Kim is President and Co-Founder of PKU Industries, a Houston engineering firm he started last year — and he's competing against companies a hundred times his size. His strategy comes from asymmetric warfare: don't match the big players deliverable for deliverable, because you'll lose 99% of the time. Stay lean, build a coalition of boutique specialists who stay in their lanes, and let AI do the coordinating. He and Richard get into why projects fail on unanticipated risk rather than engineering, why the "gotcha" contract model belongs to a world that no longer exists, why PKU walked away from commercial LLMs to build a small language model with a proprietary IP vault, and how a raised tax credit plus Texas permitting quietly rewrote the economics of carbon capture.