I’ve been thinking about scale the same way I’ve been thinking about speed: as something Silicon Valley treats like a moral good when it’s actually just a strategic choice.
The internet is drowning in posts about how to scale. Scale your team, your infrastructure, your revenue, your impact. Unicorns get celebrated. Lifestyle businesses get a little sniff of condescension, like you aimed for a studio apartment when you could have had a mansion.
You know who actually needs you to scale? Your VC. If someone gave you money expecting 20x returns, of course they’re going to preach the gospel of growth. That’s their business model, not your destiny.
But when companies get big, they get slow and stupid. Not always (maybe) but often (very.) I’ve spent years trying to bring OKRs into large enterprises and I’ll be honest: it doesn’t work most of the time. OKRs work when you have a small multidisciplinary team with a clear remit — basically a small company inside a big one. The moment you’re cross-matrixed, serving multiple stakeholders, depending on eight other teams to get anything done, OKRs become one more hassle in a job already full of hassles.
I watched the same thing happen with Lean Startup. Every big company wanted to be lean. I’m sure it made Eric Ries money. I’m doubtful it made the enterprises any leaner. “Lean enterprise.” My god. That’s as much of an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp.
Mailchimp was genuinely great once — simple, useful, got out of your way. Then it scaled. Now it’s so stuffed with features, menus within menus, bad labels, that I literally cannot figure out how to send a newsletter anymore. And I mean literally.
Buffer bootstrapped for years and grew deliberately, publishing their salaries and revenue publicly the whole time. Wildbit ran a portfolio of small software products, stayed small on purpose, wrote openly about why. Two different companies, same conclusion: you can build something real and sustainable without chasing unicorn status.
If you’re running a small business, you don’t need my permission to stay small — but you have it anyway. If you’re a founder, you don’t have to raise. Bootstrap, grow to a size that makes you happy, stop there. Blitzscaling is a strategy, not a commandment. Most founders I know got into this because they wanted to build something good while staying nimble. Somewhere along the way the industry told them that wasn’t enough.
The question isn’t how do you scale. The question is: should you? And if so, how much, and why?