Small is fast

At 4 people, we moved like lightning. At 20, we felt stuck in mud. Here's what broke and why.

You start as a single brain with eight hands. Every decision happens over lunch. Problems get solved in real time. Information flows naturally. Speed isn't something you think about—you're simply moving.

Then you grow.

A standup that took 10 minutes now eats an hour. People miss context. Code conflicts with other teams' work. Small decisions spawn meetings. Your calendar fills with "quick syncs" that aren't quick.

You blame process. You're half right.

The real problem is math. Four people need 6 connections to stay in sync. Twenty people need 190. Information that once flowed naturally now needs channels, and those channels clog. Fast.

Most companies respond by adding meetings. More standups. More syncs. More updates. They try to simulate the information flow they had at four people. It never works. You can't solve exponential growth with linear tools.

Here's what does work:

Split information into need-to-know and nice-to-know. At four people, this distinction didn't matter. At twenty, it's survival. Most decisions don't need everyone. Most meetings shouldn't exist. Most syncs can be emails. Most emails can be docs.

Your job as CEO transforms. At four people, you're a player. At twenty, you're a referee. Stop solving known problems—that's your team's job now. Your work is finding the unknown ones. The fires no one sees yet. The opportunities everyone else is too busy to notice.

Say no ruthlessly. Each yes costs more than you think. A 30-minute meeting with 6 people isn't 30 minutes—it's 3 hours of company time. Time isn't your scarcest resource—attention is. Guard it.

Build processes before you need them. We didn't, and paid for it. Write things down. Make the obvious explicit. Then repeat it until people roll their eyes. What feels like over-communication to you feels like barely enough to everyone else.

Your mood is contagious, and the infection rate doubles with each hire. One anxious comment spawns a dozen side conversations you'll never hear. One moment of panic creates ripples that last weeks. Stay steady.

These problems hit every company at the same size. It's not you—it's physics. Growing a team means fighting information entropy. Structure doesn't kill speed—it enables it. But only if you build the right kind.

What worked for us:

Write daily updates instead of having meetings. Make them scannable. Bullet points over paragraphs. Numbers over words.

Kill any meeting that's for "sharing updates." Updates should be written. Meetings are for decisions or debates.

Build public dashboards for everything that matters. Numbers don't need meetings to be shared.

Create clear ownership for every project and metric. "Everyone's responsible" means no one is responsible.

Growing slowly isn't failure—it's often survival. Speed comes from knowing where you're going, not from rushing to get there. A smaller team moving in the right direction beats a bigger team running in circles.

Sometimes that means saying no to good opportunities because you haven't built the systems to handle them yet. That feels wrong. Do it anyway.

You'll see competitors hiring faster, launching more, making noise. Ignore it. Speed is not progress. The goal isn't to be the fastest moving—it's to be the furthest ahead.