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I feel the same way. There’s a shift that happens at around 80 people where not everyone rows in the same direction. Incentives become different because not everyone “lives and dies” together or by the same metric. By the time you are at bigco status, this is so ingrained that work becomes repeated prisoner’s dilemma trials.



80 seems like a specific number


80-100: my theory is as humans who lived hundreds of thousands of years in small hunter-gathering groups, there is a natural limit to interpersonal relationships we can manage on one-on-one level.

Any levels of social complexities beyond that has to rely on systems/traditions rather than direct interpersonal relationships.


Sounds similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (in case you hadn't seen it before).




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