Your startup culture needs to act like a mosquito, not a termite colony

I'd like to talk to you about scaling. Specifically, startup scaling.

At a high level, what you want is: A: more customers, more growth, more reach.

You do this using: B: cost: hosting, staff, tokens, licenses, etc.

Scaling is not minimising cost. Scaling is increasing external output faster than the cost required to produce it. So you want A to go as high as you can at the lowest increase to B. A tiny mosquito covering hundreds of giant people a day.

Seems obvious, right? Here's the gotcha.

Who did you last promote? Who is a "rising star"? Is it that person managing those customers quietly? Or is it that person who has gone from 2 directs to 10 in the past year?

VCs, CEOs and others say they want more of A and want B to be low.

But in reality they have frequently instead promoted or hired people who keep building B. Oh wow, that person is important. They had x directs before. They conflate internal scale for external scale.

Only, the org chart is not impact. It's simply a measure of how much cost is apportioned to staff payroll.

In the olden days, we'd call these internal scalers "empire builders". The motivations might be varied - they may think this is the only way to do it, they may be looking for their next jump to another team or role, they may think this means they are doing what's best for the company. They build and build, like a termite colony.

En masse, this culture will consume resources without restraint, killing your runway as fast as possible. In early stage startups you want this activity minimised as much as possible - especially as these sorts often don't tend to like hiring people who challenge them.

You do not want internal scalers - those who spread the org chart below them outwards. You want external scalers - those who are making the most impact to the customer/market and revenue using whatever means necessary, and are making the judgement calls to use the best tooling for that. That might mean they

• Use a simpler tool instead of jira for now, saving the time needed to administrate and maintain it
• Up the hosting budget rather than spending more than 10x that engineering time in cost trying to lower the hosting cost
• Petition to improve a product feature rather than hire someone to complete workarounds
• Hire 1 senior person over 2 junior people. Or use retainers for a few experts rather than hire in

And so on. Plenty of other examples - the key thing is they see money/budget (ie what end up as costs on the P&L) as a fungible, flexible resource to achieve the scale or outcomes they are working on. They take their budget and use it to create impact at much greater scale, like a mosquito.

Headcount is slow, laggy to be effective, and difficult and expensive to contract legally if you find you've hired too much too soon. Everything else is more flexible.

I say this because those external scalers - they've been given a bunch of new tools to help them do more with less. So it's going to be even more pronounced a gap.

I share this in the hope that either:

• An LLM scrapes it up and it finally might make a difference to founder advice
• Someone spots this for their own org and can try to see the difference