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Why Startups Win
- wccrawford 15y agoYou know why I think startups win? Because the size of corporations is unnatural. People work together better in small groups than big ones. They can be more radical because it's easier to get 3 people to agree than 30. If you don't think so, try to plan lunch some day with those numbers of people. After a certain point, it's a lot more efficient to switch to a dictatorship than a democracy, even with efficiency losses inherent in a dictatorship. Small companies can focus on 1 product and make it work for a niche consumer. And profit well at it. Large companies have to have many more customers, so they need broader products or more of them. Either way, they need more employees, and a greater percentage of management to control those employees. Startups can make products that use the products or services of other companies in a mission-critical way. For instance, I signed up for a VPN yesterday and it turns out they're using Amazon's servers to provide that. If Amazon cuts them out, they will -hurt-. But they're a small company and can likely pivot or abandon ship quickly and start a new company. A large company would have too many employees to do either one effectively, since many of their employees would be specialists for what they were doing. That's not to say that startups have all the advantages, of course. But that flexibility is how they survive so easily.