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Cohen: Diluting headcount across multiple initiatives destroys a scaling company's competitive advantage

Jason Cohen · We just hit $400m in revenues. Here are 9 org chart, people moves I had to make to scale · Apr 23, 2024 · at 5:46

WP Engine founder Jason Cohen discusses organizational scaling traps and explains why larger companies lose their competitive edge when dividing staff among too many projects.

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“What I'm going to argue is that this is not what you should do, that you should instead still have only a couple of things that you do, and focus everybody, all the scale that you have, on just a few things instead of this. And the reason is that if you cut up everybody into all these different initiatives, then each initiative is not at scale, doesn't have that many people, doesn't have that many resources in terms of things like money, And so isn't very good. So you've taken what should have been this advantage of people and diluted it.”

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