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Tesla has to grow fast or go home (as do Amazon, Uber, etc'). But as you said, you can choose which company to start, you don't have to start Tesla or Amazon.

Tesla has to grow fast or go home (as do Amazon, Uber, etc'). But as you said, you can choose which company to start, you don't have to start Tesla or Amazon. I think your employees will face bigger and more interesting challenges, and learn more from smarter coworkers, and will be retained better, if you keep it a 10 person team for years and years and years. As 37signals proved more than maybe any other company. Of course, they also proved (5)... (Hi Edan!)

edanm 9y ago
From experience, a 10 person team will keep some employees happy, sure, but the best probably not. Their pay will be too low, and even if not, most good employees eventually want to do more - manage people, work on new technologies, work on bigger scale, etc. Of course, nowadays I think the average retention at tech companies is like 2 years isn't it? So this is an industry-wide problem. The bigger problem if you're founding a 10 person company is that, assuming you don't want to run this for the rest of your life, you'll eventually want people to replace you, and they will also want bigger challenges, etc. I once saw a great talk at MicroConf, by the guy who started Balsamiq, which he started with the purpose of being a 1-person company. He soon found he had to grow. The bottom line of his talk is that most companies have a "natural" range of sizes they can be, and you can choose where you want to be in the range, but it's gotta be in there. Very good and interesting talk. (Hi back! Didn't know you HN'ed)