A major cause is just the nature of a big VC round, too. In my experience (and I think generally?), the funding comes with aggressive growth targets - you're ex

A major cause is just the nature of a big VC round, too. In my experience (and I think generally?), the funding comes with aggressive growth targets - you're expected to grow far faster after getting all the money injected than before. For a lot of businesses, there's no particularly good ideas for stimulating growth except "hire more" and "acquire other companies". The question becomes "how many people do you need to hire to hit X growth target", not "is X a reasonable growth target at all", or "are more people really necessary". While this can work out for the right business, I think a lot of business are just naturally built around smaller problems, better tackled by a smaller, more agile team. With a huge problem you can effectively break it into a bunch of smaller problems, and still have tonnes of people working on it effectively without too much communication/coordination overhead. You're a huge company, but it's basically a bunch of loosely coupled small teams, each with a lot of autonomy, and few cross-team dependencies. That scales, but you need huge problem(s). If you have a smaller problem (like most startups), lots of people is just too many cooks in the kitchen, people's responsibilities overlap too much, every decision becomes a group decision, and there's lots of cross-team dependencies. This leads to massive planning cycles, everything locked down waterfall-style 3-6 months in advance, etc. Very inefficient, can no longer react quickly to change, all agility lost, and leaner startups eat your lunch.