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It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#21

Post by indubitable »

cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

It's sometimes interesting to pose a little thought experiment to somebody about what they think they could get done if they had 10 world class developers and practically unlimited resources - certainly the ability to hire or acquired almost anybody or anything within some degree of reason. What could they get done in 10 years?

Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind of makes you wonder. Do we dramatically overestimate our abilities, or does the efficiency of companies like Google truly diminish as much as this little thought experiment would seem to suggest?

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#22

Post by secabeen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #13
cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This is, incidentally, the formalization of my intuition about bureaucracies and general organizational efficiencies[0] - basically, organizational inefficiency comes almost entirely from coordination costs. This is why government organizations are inefficient (way too many stakeholders), why big companies tend to be about as bureaucratic as governments, and while small governmental projects are much less efficient t…

Government organizations also have an obligation to make many of their services available to everyone, without discrimination, whereas companies can choose to ignore portions of the market (unless it's a protected class) that cost more to service than the value gained.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#23

Post by maxxxxx »

I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn't have to work with other teams who didn't deliver and stakeholders who couldn't make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.

It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#24

Post by bpicolo »

One thing to keep an eye on as your team grows is process. It's very typical for processes/systems to evolve as teams grow and people have new opinions and decide new pieces need to get added. It's almost never the case that process gets removed. Over time, you can build a decent slowdown into your work just as a series of small increases in process cost.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#25

Post by zwieback »

indubitable wrote: post #21
cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

It's sometimes interesting to pose a little thought experiment to somebody about what they think they could get done if they had 10 world class developers and practically unlimited resources - certainly the ability to hire or acquired almost anybody or anything within some degree of reason. What could they get done in 10 years? Now multiply that by ~2,000. That's, roughly, the sort of resources Google has had. Kind o…

I'd say both. Programming/CS is particularly prone to practitioners overestimating their ability because SW is always incrementally "easy". From my own experience working across SW, HW and some mechanical design it's always the SW part where I get overconfident and I've been at it for almost 30 years.

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#26

Post by bagrow »

If I may interject a small, shameless self-promotion, we recently published a paper looking at exactly this using GitHub data [0]. Lots of caveats, academic limitations abound of course, but it may be of interest to some.

[0] R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Apr; 3(4): 160007 https://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsos.160007

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#27

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #13
cs702 wrote: post #8

Say the cost in time/money/resources of coordinating between any two individuals is on average x dollars. Let's call this figure pair coordination cost. The pair coordination cost between 3 individuals, ignoring overhead, is 3x dollars, as there are three possible pairs that need to coordinate, i.e., there are three connections in a network with three nodes. The pair coordination cost between 4 individuals, ignoring…

This is, incidentally, the formalization of my intuition about bureaucracies and general organizational efficiencies[0] - basically, organizational inefficiency comes almost entirely from coordination costs. This is why government organizations are inefficient (way too many stakeholders), why big companies tend to be about as bureaucratic as governments, and while small governmental projects are much less efficient t…

[deleted]

Re: It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]

#28

Post by wjossey »

dreyfan wrote: post #10

I run a small company of 4 people and we're currently at a $2.3M annualized run-rate. Fully remote keeps our opex very low: only about $125k excluding salaries. I do feel we've hit a wall though, as our revenue has been ~$2M/yr for the past three years with a fairly consistent team size. We have had difficulty finding the right people who can incrementally grow revenue. That said our primary competitor has ~80 employ…

You mention a few things I'd love for you to unpack further if you feel willing.

[1] You mention you have your competitor's customers churning onto your doorstep, yet your revenue is flat. Is your flat revenue then related to price cuts, or do you have churn of your own that offsets those gains?

[2] You imply that you think your team size may be the reason for having hit a wall. Care to elaborate on these thoughts?

[3] What is the current team structure (how many eng, marketing, biz, etc.)? You mention finding the right people to incrementally grow revenue.

Just another entrepreneur curious to learn from your experience growing a bootstrapped company. My co-founder and I raised a round last summer, and we're currently at 3 headcount (two of us, plus one hire that started in October in an area we have zero expertise in, but is critical to our business and credibility). We discuss what the inflection points are that will drive additional headcount, and for now that's almost exclusively revenue growth.

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