John Collison argues that startup practices like moving fast and breaking things work early but need to be deliberately unwound as you scale. Facebook went global, Microsoft moved upmarket, and Uber started premium before mass market. What works at one stage becomes a liability at the next.
Chapters
There will be things in the early days of a startup that make sense in the early days that don't scale later on. And so it's not just a question of, it's more of a continuum. There aren't just things that you should not change and things that you should be willing to change on a regular basis. There will be things that you should not change for the first two years and then gradually need to be unwound as you grow. And so in the early days of a company, it's probably really critical that they focus on the US market. Trying to win all markets is a distraction, but clearly over the long term, focusing solely on the US market is wasteful and they should go international or Facebook. For the longest time they had the mantra of move fast and break things and this really made sense for them. They were trying to have a really fast product cadence, but at a certain size you get so big that and so interconnected that moving fast and breaking things probably isn't your motto. And so they, I mean they recently explicitly acknowledged that they were moving past this. Startups end up having a really powerful path dependence where it's not just a question of arriving at the final answer. And if you had found that final answer earlier, you could have gotten there much quicker. It's a question of building a set of assumptions, following those and continually revisiting them. You're not just trying to arrive at the final form for your product, you're trying to get all the intermediate forms and the chemical reaction that get you there. A good example of this is Microsoft. They started out in the hobbyist market building basic compilers. They couldn't have stayed there and could never have become the company they are today. As a result of building compilers, they had to move upstream and they're now basically an enterprise company. But at the same time, they couldn't have started as an enterprise company because no one would have bought from them, these two random college kids. And so again, there's this path dependence to Microsoft's growth where they had to become each one of their stages to allow them to jump to the next level. Maybe another example of this is you going back to Uber. If they had just started out with their UberX model today doing ride sharing, they probably would have been shut down pretty quickly. It required them to succeed. They needed to start with the limo business, get to such a scale that it was a well known and well liked service, and then they could start doing ride sharing in some cities and prove that it was a popular model.
