One of the forgotten aspects of this is how a growing community fights the normal distribution of people's ability.
If I am a small company, it is relatively easy to employ, say, 2 very talented engineers/marketers/sales people.
As the org grows, it becomes harder to recruit the best, we have to accept slightly less than the best if we want to increase headcount. As we grow, we push our talent pool to the average and even possibly below that. Everyone who is not "the best" is, at best, a distraction or deadweight but at worst is causing negative productivity/creating tech debt/making the system less efficient.
Once you add that to the inefficiency of bureaucracy at size, it is a recipe for a lack of performance. Not necessarily rubbish but certainly not as high performing as it felt like in the beginning.
If I am a small company, it is relatively easy to employ, say, 2 very talented engineers/marketers/sales people.
As the org grows, it becomes harder to recruit the best, we have to accept slightly less than the best if we want to increase headcount. As we grow, we push our talent pool to the average and even possibly below that. Everyone who is not "the best" is, at best, a distraction or deadweight but at worst is causing negative productivity/creating tech debt/making the system less efficient.
Once you add that to the inefficiency of bureaucracy at size, it is a recipe for a lack of performance. Not necessarily rubbish but certainly not as high performing as it felt like in the beginning.