Company Culture

Kevin Scott, now CTO of Microsoft, would ask in candidate interviews: “What do you want your next job to be after this company?” Most of your team members realistically won’t stick with the same company forever. This is even more true as you scale to 20, then 50, then 100 team members and so on. But the best way to empower them to do good work is... See more

I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in... See more

If you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from:

1. Decreased skin in the game, which reduces team alignment


2. N^2 communication, which creates need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning


3. Reduced risk tolerance, which slows everything down

#1 and #2 are inevitable results of having more... See more