Size Isn't Everything

Headcount used to be how a company showed it was serious. Want to build something big? Hire a building's worth of people and buy a ping-pong table nobody uses. I don't think that works anymore.

Building Overskill, I watch things that used to take a sprint get done in an afternoon. When making things gets that cheap, having lots of people who make things stops being the advantage. What matters is knowing what to make and caring enough to make it well.

Big teams pay for coordination: meetings, docs, planning cycles, and a meeting to plan the next meeting. Small teams skip most of that. The person with the idea builds it, ships it, and reads the first angry email about it.

Taste is the new bottleneck, and it doesn't scale with headcount. Committees are where good ideas go to die slowly, surrounded by stakeholders who never visit.

A small team can hear from a customer in the morning and ship a fix by lunch. The big competitor is still trying to find a conference room that's free on Thursday.

If you're small, stop treating your size as something to grow out of. Use the tools hard, hire only for leverage or judgment you don't have, and keep the path from idea to shipped short.

The next great companies will look tiny. The big ones will look surprised.