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One shouldn't use outliers and one off examples to guide one's behaviors. Most startups will fail miserably. Most of the ones that don't and do eventually succe
by marcinzm 5y ago
One shouldn't use outliers and one off examples to guide one's behaviors. Most startups will fail miserably. Most of the ones that don't and do eventually succeed will grow over time to a decently large size before exiting. So you should expect that trajectory and not a lucky exit before you hit 50 employees.
- theptip 5y agoTrue, but existence proofs are useful if you don’t extrapolate too much from them. Ie you _can_ be a unicorn with a monolith. I think it’s not so useful to look at 30-person monoliths though, as you say. I’m sure there are 30-person startups that are jumping the gun and building microservice architectures? Don’t do that. First build the monolith. But I think what you are getting at in the latter part, and I agree: the question is whether there are 100, or 1000 employee-company monoliths. I don’t know of any, I’d guess there are some examples, but I’d be comfortable wagering that they are much rarer the bigger you get.
- papito 5y agoInstagram is still a monolith. They started breaking out some high-load things for sure, but only once it makes data-driven sense. https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-an-instagram-story-8f498ab71a0c https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-a...
- afarrell 5y ago> you _can_ be a unicorn with a monolith Even if another company can do it...that does not mean that you can. Know thyself. Jocko Willink can lead a team effectively on 5 hours of sleep a night. If I try to do that, I lose my grip on the fabric reality and the meanings of words. Know thyself.