What if getting bigger makes us a worse company?
It's become the fundamental startup dogma that if you want to be a real startup, you have to scale as fast as possible and become as big as possible.
Bigger team. Bigger revenue. Bigger everything.
What if the very things that make this company special right now, our culture, our energy, our freedom, get destroyed by growth? What if the freedom we fought so hard for turns into investor stress, board expectations, and straight-up self-loathing?
There's a point where the concept of growth masks the destruction of what made us great to begin with.
### The Hidden Costs of Getting Big
Growth always sounds like progress, but every layer we add comes with a cost.
When the company is small, decisions happen at lunch. Everyone knows what’s going on. Culture is a living thing, spontaneous, messy, human. As we grow, that intimacy fades. We get so rewarded at the idea of adding another person that no one stops to ask, "Hey, won't it be harder to make decisions, communicate, and maintain our cool culture when we add that person?"
There are massive hidden costs to growth, which at the time feel like a victory.
We raise capital and celebrate the cash (please do!), but don't stop to say, "Hey, doesn't this mean we can't do whatever we want anymore?" Or we sign a big new customer and forget to ask, "Do we want to be chained to this contract?"
It's funny how often growth equates to the dilution of quality.
### Define ‘Better’ Before We Scale It
Most of us plan for growth, not happiness. We know exactly what bigger looks like, but we rarely stop to define what better means.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of guilt. I wonder if we feel so drawn to growth that we feel guilty slowing it down for our own quality-of-life benefit. I think, "If we hire 100 more people, I'm just going to see less of my kids." Any reasonable person would push back on that, but in the Founder world, we often rationalize, "Well, that's just the cost of growth." But should it be?
Being better should be about taking the aspects of the business that we love and getting more of those. It shouldn't come at the expense of what we love. If we enjoy having absolute freedom with our schedule, then answering to investors (or annoying clients) probably doesn't make us a better company, even if it's a bigger one.
The thing is, we often don't inventory "better" like we should. Sometimes it's because those things are hard to capture (like culture and freedom), and sometimes it's because they fly directly in the face of what we picture growth and success to be. But if we're not optimizing for "better," are we really doing the right thing?
### Don’t Scale Size: Scale Quality
The best Founders I know don’t chase size. They chase quality.
They don’t want 100 more people, they want 10 people doing their best work ever. They don’t want 10x more customers, they want customers who love them 10x more.
Scaling quality means slowing down when everyone else is speeding up. It means saying no to growth that dilutes our craft, our culture, or our sanity. It means choosing craftsmanship over expansion, excellence over ego.
We talk about scale like it’s the ultimate prize. But scale without soul is just size. The companies that last aren’t the ones that grow fastest. They’re the ones that grow without losing who they are.
### No One Regrets Quality
In over 3 decades of working with startup Founders, I've heard a million tales of woe from Founders who raised too much, scaled too quickly, or built something they later hated. But I've never heard a single Founder complain about having stuck to quality.
Perhaps it's because we don't define it well, so we don't pursue it properly. Perhaps it's because we're too scared or ashamed to pursue our self-interest. But whatever the cause, nothing prevents us from recapturing quality from here on out.
We deserve to build a startup that reflects the very best of everything we've ever wanted. That's the point of doing what we do. The moment we sacrifice our best for just being "bigger," we've already lost what's important.
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