@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.
While I agree with a lot of the arguments you're saying, I disagree with the end statement. Building a massive company and building a world changing company are not mutually exclusive. It's probably more common but should not be implied.
Ususally the types of founders who want to build massive ginormous companies (that's a technical term) are different: they a) fail and/or b) don't make things; they're "idea guys" to steal a line from Signal vs. Noise.
That seems pretty inconsistent with how most companies and founders talk about their business. Amazon started with Bezos wanting to build the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Apple wanted to put a computer on every desk. Larry Page at Google when he was doing his first round of financing told John Doerr that he thought search was a $10 billion revenue business. These guys may not have realized what that would entail exactly but once they had the earliest inkling of product-market fit they committed to it.
You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.
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@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.
While I agree with a lot of the arguments you're saying, I disagree with the end statement. Building a massive company and building a world changing company are not mutually exclusive. It's probably more common but should not be implied.
Ususally the types of founders who want to build massive ginormous companies (that's a technical term) are different: they a) fail and/or b) don't make things; they're "idea guys" to steal a line from Signal vs. Noise.
That seems pretty inconsistent with how most companies and founders talk about their business. Amazon started with Bezos wanting to build the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Apple wanted to put a computer on every desk. Larry Page at Google when he was doing his first round of financing told John Doerr that he thought search was a $10 billion revenue business. These guys may not have realized what that would entail exactly but once they had the earliest inkling of product-market fit they committed to it.
You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.
Instead of doing @replies, you can click on the post's "link" and reply there even if the reply link isn't available on the comments list page.
HN hack ;)