Stripe's approach to staffing is not something that's easily imitated. Most of their employees have either previously been founders or have managed products bef

Stripe's approach to staffing is not something that's easily imitated. Most of their employees have either previously been founders or have managed products before as a higher level employee. It's not fair to assume that every startup/company will have that caliber of employee top to bottom. It also seems like Ries was trying to direct this post at all kinds of companies, not just early startups. Patrick himself said that Stripe's approach to staffing is an example of "doing unscalable things while you can". Not everyone is a small startup and the approach of letting everyone manage themselves doesn't work at 100+, 500+, 1000+, 10,000+ person companies.