Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you're right. With a smallish company, it's possible for everybody to jump in and do whatever needs to be done. As a company grows, though, this will become impossible. Many a great company in history have suffered spectacular deaths simply because they couldn't scale correctly with their success.

In my opinion, it will be impossible to have 200 employees with a flat structure.

View on HN

I don't care about what 37signals might/could look like at 200 employees. We have 27 employees today and we grow slowly. We're optimized for today. If we have to change down the road we will, but there's no sense in spending even 5 minutes worrying about if what we do today will work when we're 10x as big.

> What we learned is that adding a dedicated manager and creating a hierarchy is not the only way to create structure.

I think the misconception with the article is that the title (and focus) is "Why I run a Flat Company" as if this should be the standard for modern business. This works for 37signals, because (1) you have actively chosen to grow very slowly when you could have otherwise grown much faster and (2) you've had the fortune and ability to attract some very good people. Many businesses don't desire to do number 1 and find it very hard to do number 2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com