Across the country, in every accelerator, exec team meeting, advisor session, and board meeting, startups are asked the same question: Whether you fou

Who Cares if it Scales?

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2024-03-29 23:30:03

Across the country, in every accelerator, exec team meeting, advisor session, and board meeting, startups are asked the same question:

Whether you founded your company yesterday or you’ve been growing for years, the problem remains the same: the moment that you create a solution, whether it’s a piece of software or a business process, you start to feel pressure to optimize it. The questions come hard and fast:

This urge to prematurely scale is almost entirely fear-based, a fear that’s ironically fed by a startup’s intense desire to succeed. When we pitch our companies to investors and customers we dream big, touting exponential growth rates and massive returns on investment. We dream of disrupting industries, not niches, so naturally we start to worry on the same scale. We crave success while fearing its side effects:

Our natural response to fear is to seek control, so we try to anticipate everything that might happen and build for it now. The architect focuses on hyper-efficient code, modularity, and infinite horizontal scalability while the operations lead pushes for standardization, automation, and a host of new SaaS tools that their team won’t need for another year. In our quest to reduce risk, we add the two things our growing company doesn’t need: weight and inertia.