

How Fast-Growing Startups Can Fix Internal Communication Before It Breaks - dfine
http://firstround.com/article/How-Fast-Growing-Startups-Can-Fix-Internal-Communication-Before-It-Breaks

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birken
Not to be too negative as I think all of these things are theoretically good,
but they are all just copying things Google does, and Google is a much better
example of a successful company than a 20 person startup. FYI I'm sure many
companies were all doing these things before Google, they are just an easy
example.

1) Google moderator was invented because it was used internally for Google's
TGIF (which is essentially a giant version of the "contrarian office hours")

2) Google obviously has tons of tech talks of many different topics that are
not only available to people in the company but are often posted to youtube
for everybody

3) 1:1s are great (this isn't just common to Google but practically any well-
managed company), but if this company reaches 100 employees then there is no
way the CEO will be able to have effective meetings with everybody, and it
probably wouldn't be a good use of time either. At that time they will need to
come up with a sane management structure (very hard) that hasn't been required
yet.

Also my favorite part is:

“We tell our employees to check their egos at the door, so as a company we
need to do the same thing,”

Coming from the CEO, in an article talking about almost exclusively about how
great he is, which includes 2 pictures of himself and 0 pictures of anybody
else on his team.

~~~
state
> Coming from the CEO, in an article talking about almost exclusively about
> how great he is, which includes 2 pictures of himself and 0 pictures of
> anybody else on his team.

This is quite well directed criticism. The article is one of those pieces that
really directs your attention to what it's _tell_ ing you, but what it's
_show_ ing you is just a puff piece about URX and their series A.

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inthewoods
"We’re building a business and a product that has never existed in the market
before. There’s no precedent,"

I always find these kind of statements amazing. No precedent at all?

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chimeracoder
The article is interesting, though the most amusing part for me was the
description of the company itself (URX) and the word "deeplinking".

It's funny how in the past few years we've essentially invented both a problem
that was already solved fifteen years ago and its solution.

Hyperlinks have been around as long as the web has existed - in fact, they
could be considered the defining characteristic of the web. In contrast, most
of these apps (e.g. news publications) really aren't doing anything that can't
be done on a regular webpage on a mobile device, and yet we _have_ to have an
app for everyt site, which of course means breaking hyperlinks[0].

Of course, as always, Randall Munroe explains this more succintly and with
much more wit[1].

[0] Android's "intents" are a sort-of solution to this, but it still raises
the question of why this problem exists in the first place.

[1] [https://xkcd.com/1367/](https://xkcd.com/1367/)

