"Different organization sizes are appropriate for different tasks." Yes, if you are making chairs or cars, it makes sense to have more people (up to a point of

"Different organization sizes are appropriate for different tasks." Yes, if you are making chairs or cars, it makes sense to have more people (up to a point of inflection where the diminishing returns would make adding new workers grossly inefficient). HOWEVER, if we are talking about startups -- disruptive, scalable businesses -- they are, by definition, more efficient than big companies. I would make this argument myself, but it has already been made pretty well by PG: http://paulgraham.com/boss.html http://paulgraham.com/boss.html Startup founders seem to be working in a way that's more natural for humans...each species thrives in groups of a certain size...groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour. You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be? http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do [this is why/how startups can beat the average]. It's hard to argue that startups are not more efficient than big businesses.