Flexibility vs efficiency. Agile vs high momentum. As a rule of thumb, start-ups need to be more agile as they are mostly exploring new territory, trying to cr

Flexibility vs efficiency. Agile vs high momentum. As a rule of thumb, start-ups need to be more agile as they are mostly exploring new territory, trying to create new value or re-scope valueless things into valuable things. Larger companies operate at a scale where minor efficiency improvements can mean millions of dollars and thus require more people to do the same thing, but better. Individualistic thinking on new directions to go is not needed nor appreciated. Of course there are excepttions. The question boils down to whether or not the ladder is on the right walk before charging up it. In rare circumstances you can do both. Either the problem is trivial, or the problem becomes trivial because you have a super expert. 10x programmers who habitually write efficient code without needing to think too much have more bandwidth for things like strategy and direction. The car they drive is both more agile, accelerates faster, has a higher max speed, etc...but even this can't move mountains. The problem an individual can solve, no matter the level of genius, is still small in scope conpared to the power of movements and collective action and intention. The most poweful skill is to seed these movements and direct them. Abstractly, this is what VCs look for in founders and also a reason why very smart and technical people feel short-changed that they are not appreciated for their 10x skills. (Making 500k instead of millions/billions) They may have 10x skills, but there are whole orders of magnitude they can be blind to.