One of the biggest things that can work against a startup being good is growth. A lot of what makes a company good is common knowledge. If everybody in a company knows everything, then generally it is going to be a pretty good place to work. Communication is super high fidelity. Everybody is on the same page, and 99 percent of the work people do actually impacts the company. The bigger you get, the more siloed information gets, the less common knowledge you have, and the more likely people are working on something that ultimately the company cares nothing about. There’s politics and backbiting and nonsense. The challenge for the CEO is to make sure that as the company gets bigger, there is a good communication architecture. That’s a really hard thing.
