Not sure if it's in the same bucket as Valve or GitHub: at Mobile Jazz http://mobilejazz.com we're only 20 people (and that makes things a lot easier), but we've quite a different way of working compared to traditional companies: * We pay fair salaries. For most people in our team it's way more than what they've earned before. * We pay everyone the same (base) salary. Regardless of their role or title. * We pay quart…
Pretty amazing. Are the founders/management team working towards what might be considered a high rate of growth or an incremental one? In other words, is the staff level, revenue, expenses, and earnings in some way optimized at the current level? Kudos for focusing on your people- this mix is difficult to achieve for what I am assuming is a bootstrapped business and impossible in a venture-backed one.
Revenue and expenses are relatively stable. We've some really good quarters, and some not so good ones. But overall we're profitable. Sometimes we also spend a lot of money on "fun" things without thinking too much and then realize later that we need to be a bit more careful with spending ;-) In particular cash flow issues when waiting for the big corporations to pay their invoices.
In terms of staff, we're actually at the moment not growing that much any more, simply because having too many people makes it difficult to run such a business as the "family & friends" feeling gets lost and we'd probably need to introduce more hierarchy, which we also don't want.