chillu

You can outsource work but not your understanding

The main reason we’re building @linear this way was that as we looked back our time in working in classic hypergrowth companies like Airbnb, Uber & Coinbase and realized: 1) the very best work was always created and created fast by very small teams 2) adding too many people too quickly to the company dilutes the culture and makes the company a mess and often leads to multiple re-orgs in a year. That energy could be spent better by building in a more focused way. Instead of thinking of scaling teams, you should be curating teams. Adding, changing, removing with patience. Some benefits of growing the headcount slowly: - Easier to retain and grow the culture in a thoughtful way - Easier to keep talent bar high, and focus hiring truly excellent folks - Easier to build high quality with less people - Easier to move faster with less people - With less but high quality folks you need less management and processes, almost none - Forces you to be more focused, making sure you just focus on the important things - Less time spent in hiring, hr, people, etc drama - Costs less, easier to extend runway or become profitable early on like we have The downside is mostly that you have less bandwidth to work on many things at once, and some people and founders have to stretch a lot more and be more involved as you only have 0-1 layers between everyone and you.