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There is also the fake "high growth". I worked at startup where the CEO was growing the organization like crazy, just for the sake of showing that the company w

There is also the fake "high growth". I worked at startup where the CEO was growing the organization like crazy, just for the sake of showing that the company was growing, even though it was not. We were on-boarding engineers almost every day and did not have any work for them to do. I am talking like teams of more than 10 engineers that took months to deliver simple features. Most of the engineers were spending their time fighting their IDE, local setup and finding a purpose. Best project I worked on, it was in a team of 3 people: manager + 2 engineers. I built the whole backend and the other guy the frontend stuff. Worked like a charm! We delivered on time and things just worked. Sometime, less is better.

zemvpferreira 5y ago
Instagram was 13 people when Facebook acquired it for roughly 1 billion dollars. It had 30 million users. Plenty of us have excuses for why our companies are not worth 76 million dollars per employee. Some of us don't even try. The point is you're right: It doesn't take a lot of people to create extraordinary value.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Creativity generally doesn’t bloom without constraints. If you know you can’t afford to build something bespoke yourself, you have to find a set of tools and needs that are complementary to each other. You have to do it right, because there’s no other option.
gtramont 5y ago
(disclaimer: I've never ran I company myself, but have been part of numerous teams and experienced some growth pain; so the following is my [sort of] one-sided view of the picture) That's a pet peeve of mine. Adding more people feels more like a company "ego" inflation injected by VCs so they "look good" and valuation goes up. External pressure. It can make good ideas and teams de-rail fast… processes will be introduced, knowledge silos will emerge (because how else would you justify your job in 6 months?), great people will leave because what they don't feel connected anymore. And you rarely observe this in bootstrapped companies. There's this false pretense that adding more people will yield more "product". And that we need 1 person for infra, 1 person for backend, 1 person for web front-end, 1 person for iOS mobile, 1 person for android mobile, 1 person for… Outsiders only see these "labels" and head counts. Growth != more people. (ps. sorry if this looks unfinished and rant-y; I'm not exactly in a good mental space and needed to vent out a bit…)
- mLuby 5y ago
  (I agree with your rant.) Stepping away to take a walk helps clear the air, gets the blood moving, and changes up the surroundings. It's rarely the full solution, but quite often a good first start. Good luck, and take care.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  > Growth != more people I think you've conflated the success/ROI of the business with the need to hire more people. Success is not guaranteed, no matter how impressed we are with an idea or how proud we are of its execution. A leadership team over a long enough period of time running the business and constantly looking at "the numbers" will develop some intuition of how to steer the ship. They'll make plans for what they think they need to do to increase the chances of success, with concrete facts and trends or just good storytelling. There's no magic bullet. Your company may be mature enough that it has steady revenue so you need to protect that part of the business, because it's not fun to explain to investors that revenue is down because you pulled employees off known-revenue generating projects to do projects that may or may not move the needle. You need to be mindful that there will be future fundraising rounds, and you want existing investors to join them. So you have to hire. You need to spend money to tackle new projects, to increase your chances of success, without impacting the existing success you've had and adding headcount is much cheaper/less risky than rocking the boat on existing projects or not tackling the new things. But no plan is perfect, and even experienced leaders will make mistakes that will have negative consequences within the organization.
  - imranghani 5y ago
    I agree with you tomnipotent. Growth is not equal to more people. We all know that WhatsApp before taken by facebook has only 65 quality people team as compared to big giant companies having thousands of employee with same value. But in some cases, even without pulling people out of the team, growth is impacted by other factors e.g. competition. How to avoid such factors is definitely a challenge.
    - tomnipotent 5y ago

zemvpferreira 5y ago

Instagram was 13 people when Facebook acquired it for roughly 1 billion dollars. It had 30 million users. Plenty of us have excuses for why our companies are not worth 76 million dollars per employee. Some of us don't even try. The point is you're right: It doesn't take a lot of people to create extraordinary value.

hinkley 5y ago
Creativity generally doesn’t bloom without constraints. If you know you can’t afford to build something bespoke yourself, you have to find a set of tools and needs that are complementary to each other. You have to do it right, because there’s no other option.

gtramont 5y ago

(disclaimer: I've never ran I company myself, but have been part of numerous teams and experienced some growth pain; so the following is my [sort of] one-sided view of the picture) That's a pet peeve of mine. Adding more people feels more like a company "ego" inflation injected by VCs so they "look good" and valuation goes up. External pressure. It can make good ideas and teams de-rail fast… processes will be introduced, knowledge silos will emerge (because how else would you justify your job in 6 months?), great people will leave because what they don't feel connected anymore. And you rarely observe this in bootstrapped companies. There's this false pretense that adding more people will yield more "product". And that we need 1 person for infra, 1 person for backend, 1 person for web front-end, 1 person for iOS mobile, 1 person for android mobile, 1 person for… Outsiders only see these "labels" and head counts. Growth != more people. (ps. sorry if this looks unfinished and rant-y; I'm not exactly in a good mental space and needed to vent out a bit…)

mLuby 5y ago
(I agree with your rant.) Stepping away to take a walk helps clear the air, gets the blood moving, and changes up the surroundings. It's rarely the full solution, but quite often a good first start. Good luck, and take care.
tomnipotent 5y ago
> Growth != more people I think you've conflated the success/ROI of the business with the need to hire more people. Success is not guaranteed, no matter how impressed we are with an idea or how proud we are of its execution. A leadership team over a long enough period of time running the business and constantly looking at "the numbers" will develop some intuition of how to steer the ship. They'll make plans for what they think they need to do to increase the chances of success, with concrete facts and trends or just good storytelling. There's no magic bullet. Your company may be mature enough that it has steady revenue so you need to protect that part of the business, because it's not fun to explain to investors that revenue is down because you pulled employees off known-revenue generating projects to do projects that may or may not move the needle. You need to be mindful that there will be future fundraising rounds, and you want existing investors to join them. So you have to hire. You need to spend money to tackle new projects, to increase your chances of success, without impacting the existing success you've had and adding headcount is much cheaper/less risky than rocking the boat on existing projects or not tackling the new things. But no plan is perfect, and even experienced leaders will make mistakes that will have negative consequences within the organization.
- imranghani 5y ago
  I agree with you tomnipotent. Growth is not equal to more people. We all know that WhatsApp before taken by facebook has only 65 quality people team as compared to big giant companies having thousands of employee with same value. But in some cases, even without pulling people out of the team, growth is impacted by other factors e.g. competition. How to avoid such factors is definitely a challenge.
  - tomnipotent 5y ago