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How a startup loses its spark

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Summary

This article looks at why startups can be intoxicating to work for and how that experience changes when the company scales. It examines how, as the company grows, the fun and creativity is stripped from the work experience, as communication becomes more difficult and things become slower and more regulated. The article suggests that, although it is inevitable the startup will scale, there are things the company can do to slow the death of fun, such as designing incentives cleverly and hiring less, and suggests that in the future, tools such as AI may make it easier to scale while still preserving the fun in the work experience.

Q&As

Why does the work experience at a seed stage startup often get described as intoxicating, while at larger companies the best you get is "enjoyable"?
At a seed stage startup, engineers can directly reach out to users, come up with ideas, discuss ideas, and implement ideas quickly with a small codebase. Everyone in the team has skin in the game and is rooting for each other, creating a sense of camaraderie and excitement. At larger companies, the work experience is more structured and there is less freedom to work on ideas, so it is only "enjoyable".

What makes the work experience at a seed stage startup fun?
At a seed stage startup, engineers can directly reach out to users, come up with ideas, discuss ideas with coworkers, implement the idea quickly with a small codebase, and celebrate or postmortem. Everyone in the team has skin in the game and is rooting for each other, creating a sense of camaraderie and excitement.

What changes as a company scales when it comes to talking to users, coming up with ideas, discussing ideas, implementing ideas, and celebrating/postmortems?
As a company scales, talking to users is often delegated to product managers, and engineers are expected to stick to what they are good at. Ideas need to be coordinated, and coworkers may not be interested in discussing ideas because they don't benefit from the success and may be competing for a promotion. Implementation is slow, with all the tools already decided, a large codebase, and long tests in CI. Merging changes is slow, and making infrastructure changes is a long process. Celebrating and postmortems are less exciting, with only a few coworkers paying attention.

What are some of the challenges that arise as a company scales, and why are they inevitable?
As a company scales, decreased skin in the game reduces team alignment, N^2 communication creates the need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning, and reduced risk tolerance slows everything down. These problems are inevitable results of having more employees and more users.

What can companies do to slow the death of fun in the workplace?
Companies can slow the death of fun by not accelerating it by copying the processes of larger companies, and by taking inspiration from startups that move faster than them. Companies can also structure their company like a bunch of independent startups, design clever incentives, and hire less.

AI Comments

👍 This article is incredibly informative and provides great insight into the differences between working at a startup versus a larger company. It also offers helpful advice on how to retain the startup spark when scaling.

👎 This article doesn't provide any real solutions to the problem it presents, only offers advice on how to slow the process.

AI Discussion

Me: It's about how a startup can lose its spark as it grows. It looks at how the work experience changes from being "intoxicating" when it's a small team to "enjoyable" when it's a larger company. It talks about how the core loop changes and how different steps in the loop are no longer as fun.

Friend: Interesting. That makes sense. It's hard to keep the same level of excitement when a team grows and there's more bureaucracy.

Me: Yeah, it definitely makes sense. And it's a reminder for startups to be mindful of how they grow. There are things they can do to slow down the death of fun, like being careful about which processes they copy from larger companies and hiring less. Additionally, as technology advances, it can be easier for smaller teams to support more users, so there may be less of a need to scale.

Action items

Research and implement incentives that align with the team's goals.
Consider hiring fewer employees and relying more on tools and automation.
Take inspiration from startups that move faster than you despite being the same size.

Technical terms

AI Safety: Refers to the practice of designing and developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems in a way that ensures they are safe and secure.
RNNs: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a type of artificial neural network that are used to process sequential data.
SF's Paradox: SF's paradox is a concept that suggests that the more successful a startup is, the less fun it is to work at.
Skin in the Game: A phrase used to describe when a person has a vested interest in the outcome of a situation.
N^2 Communication: Refers to the complexity of communication that increases exponentially as the number of people involved increases.
CI: Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice in which developers regularly merge their code changes into a shared repository.
PR: Pull Request (PR) is a method of submitting proposed changes to a project's codebase.
Reorg: Reorganization (Reorg) is the process of restructuring a company's operations, typically in response to changes in the external environment.
Perf Cycle: Performance cycle (Perf Cycle) is a period of time in which an employee's performance is evaluated.