Ben Horowitz: Taking the mystery out of scaling a company
bhorowitz.com
bhorowitz.com
Still, if the company doesn’t expand, then it will never be much of a company, so the challenge is to grow and degrade as slowly as possible.
Big Truth, Big Fallacy, and the important thing to take away from the article, all crammed into that single column inch.
The author looks at his data and surmises that you should grow slowly. I look at it and surmise that you should simply not grow.
With a little time and effort, you can get a software company ticking away, bringing in a nice pile of money every year and no-longer imposing itself on your time. Over time, you can keep tweaking the income higher or the time-demand lower (or both) by adjusting the 3rd parameter, which is Quality of Life.
As soon as you start adding employees into the mix, it gets harder to keep that balance shifted so heavily in your favor.
Reading stuff like that makes me wish I never have to scale my company.
EDIT: But perhaps I'm in the minority here because this story has lots of votes and no comments, which is usually a sign of a very good submission.
Personally, I think you can optimize in hiring and picking your market to minimize the need for formal "process" or overhead as things grow. One amazing engineer requires much less process than a 10 person team. A consumer-focused product requires hiring a lot fewer salespeople than an enterprise/professional services company. Outsourcing non-core parts of your business, or choosing to live in high-margin smaller segments (e.g. licensing IP vs. owning a chip fab) can go a long way, too.
A $10b company is still probably going to need to have a certain number of employees, and thus a certain level of process, but I think it can vary by a couple orders of magnitude on each.