A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle. It can be a heavily engineered six-sigma process or it can be a well-structured regular meeting. The size of the process should be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the communication challenge that it facilitates.
Reading stuff like that makes me wish I never have to scale my company.
EDIT: But perhaps I'm in the minority here because this story has lots of votes and no comments, which is usually a sign of a very good submission.
I think it's totally reasonable to not want to go (back) to a process-driven organization -- that's why a lot of founders end up leaving, even before a 4 year vesting period is done, to go do other things.
Personally, I think you can optimize in hiring and picking your market to minimize the need for formal "process" or overhead as things grow. One amazing engineer requires much less process than a 10 person team. A consumer-focused product requires hiring a lot fewer salespeople than an enterprise/professional services company. Outsourcing non-core parts of your business, or choosing to live in high-margin smaller segments (e.g. licensing IP vs. owning a chip fab) can go a long way, too.
A $10b company is still probably going to need to have a certain number of employees, and thus a certain level of process, but I think it can vary by a couple orders of magnitude on each.
Comments
A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle. It can be a heavily engineered six-sigma process or it can be a well-structured regular meeting. The size of the process should be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the communication challenge that it facilitates.
Reading stuff like that makes me wish I never have to scale my company.
EDIT: But perhaps I'm in the minority here because this story has lots of votes and no comments, which is usually a sign of a very good submission.
I think it's totally reasonable to not want to go (back) to a process-driven organization -- that's why a lot of founders end up leaving, even before a 4 year vesting period is done, to go do other things.
Personally, I think you can optimize in hiring and picking your market to minimize the need for formal "process" or overhead as things grow. One amazing engineer requires much less process than a 10 person team. A consumer-focused product requires hiring a lot fewer salespeople than an enterprise/professional services company. Outsourcing non-core parts of your business, or choosing to live in high-margin smaller segments (e.g. licensing IP vs. owning a chip fab) can go a long way, too.
A $10b company is still probably going to need to have a certain number of employees, and thus a certain level of process, but I think it can vary by a couple orders of magnitude on each.