Why isn't blitzscaling working anymore?

Blitzscaling's lure is a Siren's song.

You did it. You're running a startup that has market fit. You got that Series A to go add fuel to the fire and go from a 10 person startup to 100 people.

This is the way. Right?

Before you 10x your org, let me implore you to reconsider the standard practice of Blitzscaling organizations. Instead I'd argue for what I’d called Sustainable Scaling.

I have three different reasons for you to consider:

• support roles

• synchronization overheard

• leverage

Support Roles

When you move from 10 people to 100 people, you naturally have some people whose jobs are related to specifically having 100 people. That is, you have some management and HR and IT and legal and accounting.

In short, you have a bunch of other roles that someone will say you need to have for a very good reason, but those people really don't help the company accomplish whatever your org exists to do.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that they're not doing anything valuable. It's just that it's only valuable because you have 100 people.

Ask yourself, does your company of 100 really need in-house legal counsel or a CFO? Do you really need a full-time recruiter, or can you work a staffing firm? Or do you really need that outside firm at all? Are you engaging with them only because you need to hire 90 people?

And what happens when those people say they're very busy all the time? You'll hire more people who do work in those departments, of course.

That is, they have an inherent conflict of interest over the long-term with the company. If they have an opportunity to grow their department because they get more work, they'll ask for it.

There's a very good reason to outsource certain job functions or buy systems to do the jobs instead. But you can avoid the entire problem in the first place if you don't have the 100 people to justify all this support.

So if you delay getting there as long as possible, you can delay the next problem as well.

Synchronization Overheard

As covered in the fantastic the Mythical Man Month, the idea that you can add 90 people and expect the same productivity anywhere in the short term is simply wrong.

Yes, you hired them these 90 people about 6 months ago, and you got great people from great organizations with a long history of success. So why does it feel like you're doing less with 100 than with 10?

It's your stand up meetings, your retros, your quick chats, your 1:1s, your tiger teams, your working groups, your cross-functional alignment meetings, your quarterly readouts.

Do you need to do them? Probably? Maybe?

You need someway to coordinate large groups of people. Large quantities of people need high bandwidth communication moments to remain in sync, bidirectional communication up and down and across a tree.

It’s a classic information systems problem as presented in the CAP theorem. You can pick two: consistency, availability, or partition toleration. Just because it’s 100 humans instead of 100 networked machines doesn’t make the implications of replicating the necessary information any less complex. In fact I’d argue it’s more complex.

But it’s a problem you have far better control over, because you can choose to not create the problem.

Besides, it’s not the one your company is trying to solve. Your organization should exist to deliver value to some group. It should not exist to gaze inwards to figure out why it exists in the first place just because it got 90 more people.

But when you quickly pile a bunch of people together, that's what you'll spend time doing. Figuring out why you’re all there.

So maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe you can get away with fewer people and do the same net amount of work and even in the same time.

Leverage

One of the primary things technology should do is enable a smaller number of humans to do something you could potentially do with a larger number. But you can do it better, faster, cheaper with a smaller group.

You can call this mechanical advantage or leverage or a number of things. But I feel like an object lesson is valuable.

Let me provide two contrasting videos: amish moving a pole barn vs building transporter moving homes.

You just witnessed about 200 individuals working together in a slow and cumbersome process that can definitely work, but takes a long time and requires lots of careful orchestration to get them all there and coordinate them all step by step while carrying the thing.

By comparison in the other video, 5-10 people move far heavier objects with far more care and far less risk and likely far more quickly.

Now someone will rightly bring up: well can't you do more with 100 people using the specialized equipment? Such a question misses the entire point of using the machine: it’s so you don’t need all of the people.

The point is to use fewer people. Blitzscaling looks at this and say, “yeah, but what if we add more people.” It’s willfully missing the point.

If you’re a technology company, you should be using technology to make the same number of people more effective or more efficient. You should pile more money onto your existing people to make them better at what they do.

Alternative: Sustainable Scaling

So when you get that big pile of money, I'd follow this playbook instead:

• hire more generalists in different roles

• get fractional leaders in non-core functions like accounting or legal

• outsource non-core work to other companies

• don’t buy big buildings or lease them—go fully remote or enable people to use co-working

• use all the SaaS you can and build as little non-core tech as you can

• accept imperfect solutions

• do without

This sustainable approach allows for you to retain the benefits of a smaller organization that better respond to the market as you grow rather than inflating your org prematurely and burning investment on things not core to your organization.