

Startups are run by founders. Mature companies are run by management teams - vitakis
http://vitakis.com/2013/01/06/the-management-team/

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noelwelsh
There seems to be an assumption in this article that you need to adopt a
typical command-and-control structure to run a successful company. There are
several examples of very flat organisations showing this is not the case.
Valve and Github are well known examples in the tech. industry. Ricardo Semler
/ Semco (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler>) is an example from
outside tech.

It's probably more work to run an organisation with a flat structure, but it
seems to be more successful if you get it right.

~~~
rgbrenner
_It's probably more work to run an organisation with a flat structure, but it
seems to be more successful if you get it right._

Define "more successful"? Valve has 250 employees, github 140. Are you saying
that these are "more successful" than more traditionally managed/structured
companies like Wal-Mart -- the world's largest retail company with $450
billion in revenue/year?

~~~
noelwelsh
Yes, I am. I wager:

\- The founder have enough money that they never need care about it again. \-
Employees are significantly happier on average than Walmart employees.

Those are the only metrics I care about.

~~~
rgbrenner
Google is not flat, and was the best company to work for in 2012 [0] because
of how happy their employees are. In addition to meeting your made up
measurements, significantly more people associated with Google have become
richer than at GitHub; Google has made billions more money than GitHub;
Employs more people; has more products; etc; etc; etc.

Flat works in small companies. It is impossible once they get above a certain
size. They cannot be "more successful".. because they will eventually need to
restructure as they grow larger.

[0] [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-
companies/2012/s...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-
companies/2012/snapshots/1.html)

~~~
michaelochurch
You don't need to be "flat" for people to be happy, but you do need a decent
amount of employee autonomy. You probably need some big-picture direction at
1000+ employees, but you don't need the closed-allocation "you work on this
project, or you pack your bags" extortion of most companies.

Some Googlers have autonomy, some don't. I don't care to get into this
discussion because for all my criticism of it, I really admire Google (the
engineers and the vision, if not the middle management and HR) but I'll just
say that the Googlers who've established a basic autonomy _are_ very happy.
They pick their projects and have little interest in leaving, unless to do
their own startup. However, there's an underclass who face manager-as-SPOF and
live or die by their "calibration scores". For them, Google is a closed-
allocation company and these people are _not_ happy.

You don't need "flat" structure outright, but open allocation is non-
negotiable in technology in 2013.

------
ruff
This is interesting—as someone who is part of a "management team" at a company
that has grown rapidly from startup to perhaps a post-startup stage, there is
some truth to this.

There's a giant void of advice out there for folks who are making this
transition. It's awkward and really challenging; like hitting puberty for your
company (I like to say we've got braces right now). HN and publications focus
a lot on startups. Business education and literature is heavily focused on
"management" in the sense of Fortune 500 like worlds (I've been in that world
as well). My sense is those two appeal to much wider, paying audiences where
much smaller sets of people actually make these jumps. There's very little
advice/tips/thoughts about how you steer your company as you get more
customers (e.g. how to manage early customers who got more attention as you
were proving your product vs. later on when the cost of that attention might
be a challenge), hire a lot of employees (training, compensation models,
etc.), build out teams (trade-offs of various structures, ability to repeat
and scale), etc. This stuff is __hard __and unless you're growing at such a
rate you can ignore it until much later on, you have to deal with it.

Does anyone out there have a collection of posts/tidbits/advice for others who
have actually managed through these transitions? The linked post talks about
trial-and-error. I'd love to read about what worked and what didn't for
others.

------
zaidf
Many of the comments here hating on the idea of management teams highlight how
blinded we can be as a community. While it may be cool for startups to hate on
BigCos, almost all start-up founders aspire at varying degrees to become the
very BigCos they bitch and moan about here.

Management teams may have their own issues but to blanket discount them shows
utter misunderstanding or ignorance. I challenge folks to find me a single
billion dollar revenue company that doesn't have some structure that looks
much like a management team.

------
wslh
Bill Gates was the founder... Larry Page is the founder... Ford was the
founder... Bezos is the founder

~~~
ruff
You're missing the point. At some time, a company has figured out at least one
way to succeed. At that time, you're going to grow extremely rapidly and take
all sorts of ways the company does things, break them down into elements, and
optimize to accelerate that growth. The "management team" are often the ones
who drive that optimization. Someone who understands engineering is going to
lead building software at scale. Someone who understands sales is going to
scale out your sales. And so forth. Founders often lead this and see across
all spectrums.

FWIW, I worked at MSFT and had opportunities with both Gates and Ballmer. I
can absolutely ensure you management teams existed at the company. Hell,
Microsoft is made of layers upon layers of management teams. A young, bright-
eyed version of myself thought this was inefficient (and it was to some
extent). But I got a chance once to ask Ballmer what a typical week was like
for him--holy hell, managing an organization of 90k+ employees is not a
challenge that many of us are made out for.

~~~
wslh
And... what was the Ballmer answer (if you can comment about it)?

I see it different, for many founders, companies are a way for a personal
grow. In that case founders grow with the company and change their management
styles. Ballmer was a very early Microsoft employee, he was even in the
IBM/DOS license negotiation.

~~~
ruff
Probably not something I can share (sorry); just, really, good management
isn't often as much about "command as control" as it is steering a lot of
smart, opinionated people who often disagree.

You're completely right on the growth aspect. If you're working somewhere with
a founder and their not growing in that way while the company is, I can see
nothing but headaches. The original link essentially calls this out... what
you did at 5 people doesn't work at 50, which doesn't work at 150, and on. You
gotta learn and adjust; as it scales up, the folks who help move beyond the
Founder and into a trusted group.

------
michaelochurch
"Management team" is a horrible pair of words. I suspect this was submitted as
a protest of the inability to downvote submissions.

Once you start talking about "the management team", you've created a company
run with an "us vs. them" mentality and that ruins the culture over time,
because the people actually doing the work are a "them". It's not something
that happens only at scale. I was recently at a startup infested with this
mentality at under 100 people.

 _Management_ is a function. It's work that needs to be done, like
_administration_. Drawing lines within the company is one way to end up with a
horrible culture as people try to cross or control the line. Ultimately, as
soon as you have a company where people succeed or fail based on their ability
to control the division of labor, your culture will tend inexorably toward
corporate grey goo, no matter how good your company's original intentions
were.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
It is also nice to contrast with Github's[1] and Derek Silvers'[2] phylosophy.

Yishan Wong (now CEO of Reddit) also wrote some pretty insightful ideas[3] he
came to while helping Facebook grow.

[1] <http://tomayko.com/writings/management-style>

[2] <http://sivers.org/delegate>

[3] <http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html>

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pixie_
Incredible companies are run by management teams, run by founders. Jobs,
Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc..

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crgt
There are many ways to grow. See, for example:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html>

Depends upon your market and what you're trying to build.

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pla3rhat3r
Good article. Seems like common sense information but still, good stuff.

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obilgic
This is a GREAT post. I can't express how real every sentence of this post.

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ucee054
See also: commandos vs infantry vs police

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/commandos-
infantry-...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/commandos-infantry-and-
police.html)

