The speed of execution and the time spent on work as opposed to the time spent on talking about that work are a function of employee size. As a company grows, its problems grow with it. But just how fast these problems grow relative to the company is usually underestimated. The speed with which something is done at a company depends on the number of people involved in that thing. As every step has to go through everyone, often sequentially. And a delay at each step adds up to the total delay. If one step gets held up for some reason like unavailability of someone, that delay also adds up. Then the time spent on explaining things to people involved also increases with the number of people involved. Usually, something only moves to the next step when there is some sort of consensus on it from everyone involved. But for everyone's take on it, everyone has to be informed of it. So the more people involved in something, the more time it takes to explain things to everyone involved before moving to the next step. The share of work keeps decreasing compared to the share of communication. What is obvious is that these problems grow with the number of people. But what is not obvious is that how ridiculously faster the problems grow compared to the people. In communication, it doesn't just matter the people that talk to each other, but also who talked with whom first. Meaning it's not just that Talha says to Ali and Fahad but also who Talha says to first. Because the order is important and the same person may be involved multiple times in the same step, it becomes a scary permutation. The number of possible ways you can have communication between 12 people is not 20% more than for 10 people. Rather it is a ridiculous 13200%. And this is just going from 10 to 12. Imagine going from 10 to 50. Pure chaos. But fortunately there are a number of ways to avoid this situation. The first is to keep the number of people involved in a project small or to bypass everyone in the middle to go directly to the focal person. This reduces the sequential delays added to it. The chances of a 20 person project being held up is high as there are 20 possible points at which things can be stopped compared to a 4 person project. That is why some really big companies that are able to continue working like startups have rules around small teams. Amazon is known for having two-pizza teams. Meaning a team only big enough to be fed by two pizzas. The second is to move from a permission model to an audit model where not everyone needs to approve everything for it to go forward. But to do this properly would require sufficient documentation so everyone with the discretion to make decisions has all the information needed to make them properly. Netflix defines an upper ceiling up to which decisions can be made without approval. But that bar is extremely high. So much so that when one executive joined Netflix she was shocked that no one would be there to approve million dollar decisions and it will be her discretion alone. If you work at a 50 member company that does B2B2B2C, there won't be chaos. The word used to describe what you'll have has probably not been coined yet. The first time I felt there was a problem was when a customer complaint had to go through the customer support team and then the supply team then the delivery team and then the finance team and then back to the customer support team to reach resolution. All of these steps were sequential and each would take 2-3 days with the whole process taking up to 2 weeks. To try and solve this, we connected the customer support staff directly with the suppliers and the couriers both the supply and the logistics teams and giving them the discretion to pay customers money instead of it going though the finance department. At this point, we're probably the only company in Pakistan where the refunds are paid from accounts owned by the customer support representative themselves. I've experienced refunds at a number of places and I've found that our 2 day refund is the fastest in the country. Of course all of this comes with its own problems. We've ended up sending the wrong amount of money to people or the right amount of money but to the wrong people (Most of them surprisingly return the amount). But these secondary problems are the ones we can solve and have solved to a great extent. We're not merely exchanging one set of problems with a different set of problems. Rather we're exchanging problems with solutions that have their own problems but move the needle forward. Communication is one of the big problems. Long communication chains and dependence of decisions increases its share of resources and makes the organisation inefficient. That is why big companies lose to startups. And the worrying part is that both of these problems are automatic. But if you actively work against them you can actually avoid them.