

Ben Horowitz: Taking the mystery out of scaling a company - sk_0919
http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/02/taking-the-mystery-out-of-scaling-a-company/

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jasonkester
_As the company grows, things will only get worse from here in each
dimension._

 _Still, if the company doesn’t expand, then it will never be much of a
company, so the challenge is to grow and degrade as slowly as possible._

Big Truth, Big Fallacy, and the important thing to take away from the article,
all crammed into that single column inch.

The author looks at his data and surmises that you should grow slowly. I look
at it and surmise that you should simply not grow.

With a little time and effort, you can get a software company ticking away,
bringing in a nice pile of money every year and no-longer imposing itself on
your time. Over time, you can keep tweaking the income higher or the time-
demand lower (or both) by adjusting the 3rd parameter, which is Quality of
Life.

As soon as you start adding employees into the mix, it gets harder to keep
that balance shifted so heavily in your favor.

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revorad
_A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle. It can be a
heavily engineered six-sigma process or it can be a well-structured regular
meeting. The size of the process should be scaled up or down to meet the needs
of the communication challenge that it facilitates._

Reading stuff like that makes me wish I never have to scale my company.

EDIT: But perhaps I'm in the minority here because this story has lots of
votes and no comments, which is usually a sign of a very good submission.

~~~
rdl
I think it's totally reasonable to not want to go (back) to a process-driven
organization -- that's why a lot of founders end up leaving, even before a 4
year vesting period is done, to go do other things.

Personally, I think you can optimize in hiring and picking your market to
minimize the need for formal "process" or overhead as things grow. One amazing
engineer requires much less process than a 10 person team. A consumer-focused
product requires hiring a lot fewer salespeople than an
enterprise/professional services company. Outsourcing non-core parts of your
business, or choosing to live in high-margin smaller segments (e.g. licensing
IP vs. owning a chip fab) can go a long way, too.

A $10b company is still probably going to need to have a certain number of
employees, and thus a certain level of process, but I think it can vary by a
couple orders of magnitude on each.

