It sounds like the informal style of a small company didn't scale. I've heard various #s between 50 and 160 batted around as optimal sizes of organizations, af

It sounds like the informal style of a small company didn't scale. I've heard various #s between 50 and 160 batted around as optimal sizes of organizations, after which you need more structure. The challenge is that interpersonal relationships grow n^2 with organization size. This is in part why the Mythical Man Month tells us to not add bodies. A high level summary of some the research is here -> http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.html http://jstrande.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/optimum_organiz.htm... Intuitively this makes a lot of sense. At some point you have to say, "You do your part, and I'll own mine, here's the deal we're setting up to get each of our parts done, but we each have some autonomy in how to do it."