Yaniv Bernstein (CTO of Violet, ex-Google) explains the key employee headcount thresholds where startup founders must begin instituting organizational structure.
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Bernstein: Google engineers ignored Larry Page and Sergey Brin's unscaled review advice
“The founders, Larry and Sergey, who are some of the smartest people on the planet, they used to run the company by basically walking into a room, asking the team what they did, put it on a whiteboard, and then they would use their superior knowledge and intell…”
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Bernstein: Startups fail more from insufficient structure than excessive process
“I think the common problem is not enough structure and process, which is a funny thing to say, right? Because, but if you think about it, there are two pathways that a founder has gone through. Either, like you say, they've worked at a really big company. They…”
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Bernstein: Founders who try flat organizational structures always realize they fail
“Every person who has had that idea of, oh, I don't need managers, we can have a flat structure, learns that they were wrong. You know, it might seem that, again, management gets a bad name from big companies where you've got, you know, pointy haired bosses jus…”
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Bernstein: Wondering whether to fire someone means you waited too long
“You know what I've never heard in my career is I regret letting that person go. You know what I hear all the time is we should have done it sooner. And so by the time you're wondering whether you should let that person go, my advice is you probably already wai…”
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Bernstein: Biggest scaling traps are not adapting roles and refusing to delegate
“I think the two biggest issues I see with people is firstly, they don't recognize that the role has changed. They think that what got them here will get them there, right? That they can keep doing the job the way they did it when it was just them and a co-foun…”
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Bernstein: High founder context retention eventually becomes a liability
“The more you can hold in your head, the further you can go before it all starts crashing down around you, right? Maybe you can hold a hundred folks worth of context in your head because you're very clever and very hardworking, but every person hits their limit…”