Thread by @Austen

As startups grow there is extremely strong pull into what I call the death spiral of bullshit.

More people -> more teams -> more buy-in required -> more meetings -> being persuasive rewarded more than building -> builders leave -> nothing gets done

This force is VERY strong.

The mistake many founders (myself included) make is assuming the death spiral is an unavoidable part of working in a bigger company.

I’m growing convinced that the single most important cultural aspect of a company is if/how they avoid this spiral.

I began noticing this pattern when I read that Amazon had an explicit goal to have *less communication* - the intent was to have the code speak for itself.

I believe this was one of the reasons @JeffBezos pushed so hard to for everything to be microservices + APIs.

Facebook built a culture of “move fast and break things” - an explicit attempt to reward building things - even the wrong things.

Apple was perhaps simpler. Jobs was the dictator and de facto head of product. If you weren’t shipping what he liked you were fired.

Musk got in trouble for dismissing spreadsheets, meetings, and anything else tangentially related to the death spiral (despite the fact that Tesla utilizes all of the above).

Netflix only hires very senior people and fires a lot of them.

Examples go on and on.

There are perhaps many different angles or cultures, each with different tradeoffs.

But the thing that is true at most great companies is they found a way, or many ways, to retain focus on product, and to keep the death spiral of bullshit to a minimum.

It’s actually natural for most founders to despise the death spiral, but they can get tricked into thinking it’s an unavoidable part of growing up.

It’s not.

Or, at a minimum, the goal should be to have as little of it as possible, not to embrace it.

Things I’ve seen work:

* Teams as small as possible
* Extremely high talent bars
* Explicit decision-maker + disagree and commit
* Permission assumed in all things
* High tolerance for the (good) failure
* High tolerance for (good/non-infra) technical debt
* Zero tolerance for not being in details

I suspect there are many more flavors I'm unaware of.

But probably the most important part is to know:

1. The pull of the bullshit death spiral is EXTREMELY strong
2. Do everything in your power to fight it

Reaction from someone at Facebook (will remain anonymous):

“You used to famously be able to have an idea and ship it in the same day. You would get fired if you did that today.”

I asked what happened at Facebook:

Hypothesis: Regulatory scrutiny became so intense policy team are the bottleneck and run the show now, eng and product have to ask for permission to do anything.

Tricky one to solve.