smallness

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

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

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

 You walk down your high street. What do you prefer to see there? The economist will say: Walmart, Best Buy, the Gap. Scale economies — cheaper prices — better for “consumers”! But the human being will say: an independent cafe, a good bookshop, a boutique clothing store. Why? Because they offer many things that mega scale organizations don’t.

Both Bluesky and Lemon8 are designed to be black holes. We are all of us craving something new, places and spaces online that we can go to feel good and have fun and be inspired. These are normal human things to want; people want to be around each other. But it is almost impossible to create or maintain that kind of space if your company's goal is

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What do they got? A big team, lots of money, a strong brand, seemingly unlimited resources, panache, reputation, all that. They’re established. They’re your competitors. You want to look away, but you see them everywhere. Their ads on your social, their name in the media, your… Show more

Almost everything about growing the size and scale of your team has immediate and detrimental impacts to the thing that matters the most: building awesome products. Unless you actively fight against these effects, you’ll wake up one day with a very effective bureaucracy machine… Show more

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