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Small Teams
- adminu 4y agoThe ARR for BuiltWith is probably off[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322265
- sparks1970 4y agoThanks for the link that leads to: https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3bbc17c239f https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3b... Main thing that comes out of it is "focus". Focus starts to dissipate the larger the team. I don't think focus will guarantee you success (you could be focused on the wrong thing) but I don't think you can be successful without it.
- rattray 4y agoNice. I wish all the examples included user/revenue/impact numbers (like Instagram) rather than only investment/valuation information (like Notion, WhatsApp, Kylie Jenner, etc)
- 0xfffafaCrash 4y agoIt would be interesting to see a list of unsuccessful small teams as a point of reference. Oh wait… it probably wouldn’t. Then again, a list of unsuccesful large teams may not offer much insight either. There may be many advantages to small teams and yes there are cases where they have wild financial success, but in general these may just be outliers. Are these outliers because they have the secret sauce worth emulating? Maybe, and maybe their stories will show why they succeeded where so many failed. Success is rarely all luck, but we’ll likely also invent myths around their exceptionalism as we tend to do. Not the type of exceptionalism which precludes the rest of us from having a similar shot of course, but one about cleverness and grit or other characteristics we can fairly easily attribute to ourselves. Everyone likes a good narrative, I suppose. And narratives about scrappy small teams achieving success meritoriously are more attractive than ones about how the massive organizations usually tend to eat them for lunch (despite having their own types of problems) or ones about the frequencies with which the scrappy teams fail. Cherry-picking data points is the key to any good narrative.
- Xeoncross 4y agoSmall teams often move faster than big teams, that is why small teams are bought by big teams instead of big teams just building their own and quickly taking market share and crushing them with better designs, features, pricing, marketing budget and iteration speed. Big stuff is slow by nature. Lots of moving parts.
- nullsense 4y agoIt's just probability theory meets survivorship bias. The larger the team the more it will trend towards the average because the joint probability that everyone in the team is simultaneously awesome (or awful) becomes lower and lower as a function of team size. Same thing happened with "small schools perform better" so they got funded. But turns out it's possible for them to perform terribly for the same reason it is for them to perform well.
- still_grokking 4y ago> Same thing happened with "small schools perform better" so they got funded. But turns out it's possible for them to perform terribly for the same reason it is for them to perform well. And reason(s) would be?
- nullsense 4y agoJoint probability all members are either all excellent or all terrible is higher when the number of people is smaller.
- still_grokking 4y agoProbability changes with sample size? Any source for that claim? AFAIK only variance changes with sample size. Otherwise statistics would be quite useless in general as I understand it. Say in the general population 10% are excellent. If I look at 10 randomly selected people I expect that one of them is excellent. If I look at 10 000 people should I really expect that more than 1 000 are excellent? That claim does not make sense to me.
- version_five 4y agoThe celebrity ones don't belong on the list. Barack Obama makes lots of money as a speaker too, it's not because of some inherent efficiency of small teams.
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- tkrskxyz 4y agoDo those numbers also include any "contractors"? If not they are meaningless.
- readthenotes1 4y agoiirc, minecraft's musician was a contractor. Or was it poet?
- Shared404 4y agoAt least the poet who wrote the End Poem was.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoYes, C418 was an independent freelancer and even retains ownership of all(?) the songs he produced for Minecraft.
- eugenhotaj 4y agoSome of these are so odd. When Kylie Jenner launched her company she could have sold celery and still made $1B+. It wasn’t because of the effectiveness of her small team.
- teachrdan 4y agoShe also certainly had an army of contractors and laborers overseas who designed and manufactured her cosmetics.
- joelthelion 4y agoMost likely her cosmetics are fully designed, manufactured and distributed by a well-established company such as Procter & Gamble.
- motoxpro 4y agoStill stands. She build a "billion dollar" audience with a small team.
- rco8786 4y agoI wish Notion weren’t on this list. No offense to Notion, I’m a fan of the product, just that “raising at a $2B valuation” is kind of an anti goal.
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- jacktheturtle 4y agoYeah feels very anti-small team
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- sneak 4y agoIt wasn't a small team that landed humans on the Moon. It won't be a small team that does the same for Mars. Small teams can do amazing things with the right force multipliers (eg software). But some epic-scale projects also require epic amounts of staff.
- vouaobrasil 4y agoYes, especially when a lot of the work is grunt work. Think of making a 2-hour movie. Even the ones without much special effects like dramas require an enormous amount of people since there is so much grunt work to do.
- Lio 4y agoI agree but I guess we could make the same claim of "survivor bias" for these big NASA projects as many are making about small teams. Really I think the success is down to how well managed a team is and how focussed they are on productivity. It's much easier to manage a small team because there's just fewer lines of communication and places for problems to hide. The larger the team the more you are going to have to organise work if only to distribute it to members. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that management activity itself is productivity but it's not. It's necessary but it's just admin. A bit like single vs multi-threading. You should do as much admin as needed but no more.
- compiler-guy 4y agoI’ll take “survivor bias” for $1,000.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThe list of failing small teams is in appendix A…
- still_grokking 4y agoNonetheless small teams have a big advantage: Much simpler and better communication and coordination. It's impossible to efficiently communicate in a big team. Also it's impossible to efficiently lead a big team. Big organizations are like slime molds. They by principle can't be as effective as small teams. https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/ (This was submitted to HN at least 3 times but didn't get much love so I'm not linking the few comments).
- berkes 4y agoWhat makes this interesting is that many of the linked resources talk about how "being small" was instrumental to their success.
- hbrn 4y agoA lot of folks will claim all of this is just survivorship bias, but I believe there are lessons to learn. For example most of the extremely successful software products produced by small teams have a heavy focus on UX. Arguably, it is nearly impossible to achieve in a big team, because UX is a bottleneck that is hard to scale. I also find it really sad that a lot of the small teams who are on the road to success get distracted by applying "best practices" that were built for big teams (e.g. Google uses kubernetes, we should too).
- eyelidlessness 4y agoAn interesting case here is Craigslist. I won’t say their UX is poor per se, but it’s very much a matter of taste that not everyone shares. Notably, the Venn diagram of their user base and the people who vocally laud their UX is likely an enormous circle with a competitively tiny one hiding inside it (respectively). I think it’s interesting because while I personally don’t like the Craigslist UX, I have no objection to using it anyway (even if might I try other solutions first). They provide enough other value to me, and the UX is good enough, that I still have an overall positive impression of the service. I also find it interesting because the debatability of their UX is really very surface level. There are all kinds of things I wish were different, but that’s mostly because it was perfectly fine in 200* and hasn’t much changed with the times beyond a few utilitarian niceties. I’m sure this is way overly specific to CL as a reply, but your comment about UX focus resonates with me, and I’ve long found Craigslist’s lasting success fascinating in this light.
- jdougan 4y agoOn the other hand, stability has value too. I can go onto CL and immediately know how I'm going to drive it, because it has been so stable. This can save a surprising amount of time.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoYep this is what I meant to acknowledge. Whatever other UX complaints I might have, it’s consistent and predictable and that’s a lot of why I don’t have a problem overlooking my gripes.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoThe company I mirrored my companies after also had quite a smallish team at 250 when it was valued at over $3 billion: Valve.
- kixxauth 4y agoIn most large businesses the most significant work is done by 20% or less of the workforce (I work for a fortune 100 company). Too often the team size is a proxy for how successful an entrepreneur is. Although I’m not a fan of the solo entrepreneur/ build in public fad, there is a lot of merit to starting with one or two and only adding great people to the team when needed. And I think entrepreneurs overweight their indicators for when more people are needed to continue scaling. A business can usually continue scaling by refining processes and building or buying better support and tooling software.
- dzink 4y agoYou can beat product quality of well funded big teams with an experienced small team. Most that successfully do so don’t brag about it. Only reason to pay for PR is if you are trying to attract a lot of talent or pretend you will dominate the market (which is a VC play). Bragging about success as a small team is like waving a huge juicy steak at all the VC EIRs. Not worth it. Instead of sweating competition, you can keep capturing more of your market quietly. With Generative AI I would bet more and more products will be dominated by small teams of pros. Google and Meta the will always be restricted by screen size and competing internal projects, so consistency wins if you get a revenue stream to keep you alive.
- tptacek 4y agoWhat exactly does it mean to "wave a steak at a VC EIR"? What is it you're saying an "EIR" does in this situation?
- TeMPOraL 4y agoThey could start or join a company to directly compete with yours, and/or direct the attention of the VC fund to such company. If your existence is a proof positive there's opportunity to exploit, it's not wise to advertise it, as there are people whose very job is to find such opportunities and frack them (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking, except with money instead of a fracking fluid).
- iainctduncan 4y agoI work in technical due diligence, and this is spot on. One of the questions we get asked to find out is "how hard would it be for a competitor to copy this quickly?".
- bootstrapper35 4y ago> Instead of sweating competition, you can keep capturing more of your market quietly Would you recommend this strategy to a non-niche / broad category B2C product? It would feel instinctive to just get it out there and leverage every opportunity there is to market it, within the budget.
- Sophistifunk 4y agoThese are almost entirely a list of things that could not exist without (pre-existing) celebrity status, or simply purchases made to get a jump-start on network effect value for an adtech platform that exploits rather than empowers users.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoNomadlist is a notable one that's missing
- Olphs 4y agoIt's just couple million a year business, so nothing that extraordinary
- Sparkyte 4y agoSmall teams and large teams can be effective. It is not proportional either. Small teams afford agility and avoid feature creep. Fewer overhead to alter or change the projection of a project away from its intended targets. Large teams suffer from feature creep because you introduce non-development talent pursuing concepts under the umbrella term of product design. You only need two to three product design people no more. But the second you get convinced into more product design folk they'll be shelling out feature requests that then put teams in feature creep which really blocks engineering goals and architectural planning for major systems. Usually better if doubles as an engineer and product designer because from my experience product designers who don't understand how their systems work are air bags.
- wenbin 4y agothere are way more small teams (1~10 fte) in software world than people expect, but they don’t make enough money to be on such list. still, their revenue might be USD $1m/enployee. good for individuals, but not good enough for media/blogs to report, because that won’t generate enough clicks :) a book i always recommend is https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Great-Money/dp/039957896X/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=53dc8d06-a1d2-4590-b8bc-4fa35311c4b9 https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Gr...
- qthrowayq0909 4y agoHow do you trust accounting to some unknown overseas guys? It just seems too scary to me...
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- osigurdson 4y agoI suspect we will see our first single person / $1B valuation company in the next 20 years due to AI amplification.
- nigamanth 4y ago20? At this rate I would've thought 5 lol. Inflation is also going up.
- jgaa 4y agoThis list aligns with my personal bias when it comes to what makes sense in building great software. Ironically, one of the primary goals for a US startup I worked for recently was to rapidly increase the team size to show how successful they were to investors and potential customers.
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- alpb 4y agoKen Thompson prototyped the first version of UNIX in assembly language for PDP-7 in three weeks, while his wife was away on vacation. One could argue Ken Thompson/Dennis Ritchie/Doug McIlroy have made a remarkable impact on laying out the principles behind the future of computing even today in such a short time.
- rippeltippel 4y agoOne could also argue that conjugal life is detrimental to the progress of human technology.
- baby 4y agoI can only assume that even less progress would be made without conjugal life.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoIt's a mixed blessing for sure.
- concordDance 4y agoWhy can you only assume this?
- christophilus 4y agoProgress of the type we are discussing requires a human being. Human beings come from pregnancies. Pregnancies usually come from conjugal life.
- baby 4y agoPeople are different but loneliness doesn't tend to make you productive on the long run.
- concordDance 4y agoTrue only in the short term. Need to make new humans with the prone-to-advancung-technology memes and genes, which means conjugal life!
- neural_thing 4y agoBest theory I've read about why large organizations suck: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS Warning: long.
- will5421 4y agoCan you summarise it, or point to a particularly good passage? Even what I read was good, though.
- neural_thing 4y agoAs organizations grow, they do things not because they are good for the org, but because they are good for someone's career ambitions. Things get markedly worse when you jump from 3 levels of the hierarchy to 4 and get middle managers reporting to middle managers. The whole thing is worth reading, though.
- brw95 4y agoIn the case of Joe Rogan, Kylie Cosmetics and the Gartman Letter, an individual is the product. To me, it does not make sense to include these in the list.
- username_my1 4y agofor me I'm surprised that craigslist is just randomly in the middle of the list, a business that makes 1bn in ARR with 50 employees is insane and should be in it's own separate category. all other companies are listed in 10s of Mil in Annual rev (sometimes one spike) or acquired for billions (which implies rev in 100s of mel). craigslist is the gold standard of this category.
- rkagerer 4y agoI'm surprised Dropbox isn't on that list. Didn't they have a tiny headcount around the time they hit 1B valuation?
- revskill 4y agoI hardly trust any service who refused to list their "drawback".
- RNAlfons 4y agoDamn, I hoped for an article on a new MS Teams client...
- iainctduncan 4y agoI work in technical due diligence, but principally for private equity, who have a different priority from VC. They want to see healthy businesses over growth at all costs. I see lots of very successful small teams. I'm firmly convinced now after 60+ diligences that a small team of the best devs money can buy is the way to go, unless you are chasing VC money and need to show team growth for the optics.