smallness

Apple encourages big thinking but small everything else.

If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?

You: If you haven’t worked with a small company before, you’re in for a nice surprise: Smart people you can actually talk to, people who care about what you need, people willing to go out of their way to make sure you’re successful.

Customer: I get that, but little companies fail all the time. How do I know you’ll be around to give me that great sup... See more

I have some great memories of talking about “investing in things that doesn’t change”

So, small is good but doesn’t scale and can be overwhelmed by changes, and big is powerful, but ugly.

Online, we need to make the big feel smaller, in the right ways. The challenge to start small from something that is currently controlled by Facebook and Google, is very hard. But people are doing it. Look at The Correspondent, or Open Culture, or Brain Pickings, or thousands of other small projects that have good communities around them. We need m... See more

We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s ... See more

A “small giant” is a company that chooses to optimize for mojo instead of growth.

You sometimes hear that a team built something great despite being small - we think that teams most often build great things because they’re small (with strong talent, passion, and chemistry, of course). So our hiring approach thus far is hiring only people that are so talented they could have been co-founders in another sequence of events. We’re f... See more