Kevin Weil: A Shared Understanding of Mission

The way you organize a five person startup is very different than the way you organize and operate. A 50 person is very different than the way we organize and operate Instagram today at 4 or 500. Kind of. Every time you double, things change. And by the time you've 10x, things definitely are different. So I think it's natural when you're really small to be a lot more founder led where things do go through the founder. You don't have the bandwidth if you're six people to have people running different experiments and other things. You want to have a very, very crystal clear goal and operate entirely around that, like trying to find product market fit. I think it becomes different once you've found product market fit and you're growing and trying to scale. It starts to become more and more important for the mission, not to just be in the founder's head, but for the mission to be something that everybody can repeat for the most important. Like you should be able to go around to your company as it scales and ask anybody what are the three most important things we're working on? And if people give different answers, then you've got work to do. Everybody should be able to give the same answer. Everybody should be able to talk about the mission and how those things that you're doing, the three most important things, relate back to the mission. And so the more you can get everybody focused on the same things and understanding the mission, the more you can distribute decision making down into teams and hopefully move faster in parallel with everyone going the same direction. You don't want to move faster with everyone going different directions at all times. You want to move faster with everyone going in parallel. And that's what the mission's for.