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>> There's a lack of people wanting to scale businesses. Isn't this the role of experienced managers: join the business at a point it has shown possibility to

by ippisl 15y ago

>> There's a lack of people wanting to scale businesses. Isn't this the role of experienced managers: join the business at a point it has shown possibility to scale(and big profits) and make the scaling happen ? And if you've got a successful and growing business you could manage to hire a good manager to do this ? or there's a lack of people who are fit for this task ?

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
You would think so, wouldn't you? This is a bigger discussion than I have time to do justice, but there's an entire field of business books around the "valley of death" -- this huge hole that businesses go into and never come out. It's not a linear-scaling thing. 10 people aren't just 10 times harder to manage than 1. The reason you see lots of 20-50 person IT shops is that they never made it out of the valley. There's this huge consulting field dedicated to helping businesses who get stuck here. (Whether they actually help or not is up for debate). For instance, if you have 500 people, you'll have a full HR staff full of people becoming experts in various areas of corporate staffing law that affect you directly. If you have 100, you don't have the funds for those guys yet you are still affected by the same laws. It's that way for a hundred things -- the overhead is okay if you are big but unmanageable if you are crossing the line between small and medium. If you have enough acceleration, yes, you can bulldoze your way through. Just start writing checks. Google and others did this. But it's not like server scaling where for each bit you grow you can just add more management. Wish that it were so simple! Instead there are these regulatory plateaus you reach where it's an entirely different world past that. Then there's just the issue of scaling a lot of people working together, which gets harder in an exponential fashion. None of this is fun -- and what it does is stifle all the companies without the huge accelerations.

by ippisl 15y ago

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

You would think so, wouldn't you? This is a bigger discussion than I have time to do justice, but there's an entire field of business books around the "valley of death" -- this huge hole that businesses go into and never come out. It's not a linear-scaling thing. 10 people aren't just 10 times harder to manage than 1. The reason you see lots of 20-50 person IT shops is that they never made it out of the valley. There's this huge consulting field dedicated to helping businesses who get stuck here. (Whether they actually help or not is up for debate). For instance, if you have 500 people, you'll have a full HR staff full of people becoming experts in various areas of corporate staffing law that affect you directly. If you have 100, you don't have the funds for those guys yet you are still affected by the same laws. It's that way for a hundred things -- the overhead is okay if you are big but unmanageable if you are crossing the line between small and medium. If you have enough acceleration, yes, you can bulldoze your way through. Just start writing checks. Google and others did this. But it's not like server scaling where for each bit you grow you can just add more management. Wish that it were so simple! Instead there are these regulatory plateaus you reach where it's an entirely different world past that. Then there's just the issue of scaling a lot of people working together, which gets harder in an exponential fashion. None of this is fun -- and what it does is stifle all the companies without the huge accelerations.