Dan's lovely quote is from a story in this morning's New York Times. It is about how Google has become so big that it has lost its start-up feel and some of its best employees are heading for more exciting places, especially Facebook. As further evidence of Google's concern about a talent drain, Google gave every employee a 10% (or larger) raise this month. I agree with the story's premise that Facebook is one of the hottest employers in Silicon Valley, partly because they do give technical folks very cool work (although so does Google) and partly because they are pre-IPO, so there is the lure of a big payday when they go public.
The challenges of scaling an exciting small company into a big one are not easy (see this great post by venture capitalist on Taking The Mystery Out of Scaling a Company, which I will likely do a longer post on soon). But I do think that Google has done a pretty good job here; size creates complexity that is unavoidable, but they've done a good job of staying pretty lean and not adding excessive rules and constraints compared to most rapidly growing companies. But the process whereby people leave a once small company to start their own company or to join a smaller and more exciting one has always been part of the growth cycle in every company, especially in Silicon Valley. Indeed, during the glory days of Hewlett-Packard, they fueled the growth of Silicon Valley with employees who left to start their own companies (including Steve Wozniak; his Apple PC to them, but they didn't want it). Although the loss of specific employees was regretable, these same employees helped fuel an ecosystem of innovation that benefits HP to this day — and the same is true of Google.
I wonder, what other companies have impressed people for their ability to scale without sclerosis, and which companies are horror stories of red-tape, unnecessary rules, and petty politics, and bulky bureaucracies?
P.S. The large company that has done the most impressive job of scaling (although there are some unattractive features about them) is Wall-Mart. Their lack of excessive complexity and action orientation is really something.
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