A former employee describes working in Elon Musk's lean team environment after an acquisition, focusing on how the company scaled products rapidly. The speaker reflects on team dynamics and the pace of development under Musk's direction.
I've always liked lean teams, but the experience at X has made me change the way I think about starting that company. It would be even leaner than I would have made it before. I've been amazed with just how much the team is able to accomplish with a small group. And I think because of a small group, shortly after the acquisition, we had this product called Spaces. It had been in the product before, but it was pretty small scale. And Elon wanted to run these large spaces. I forget who the first people he was going to bring on were, but he was going to be there, you know, ultimately these things have gone on to host politicians and things like that. And he's like, guys, we gotta scale this up. I forget the numbers. He's like, we need to be able to scale like a million people or something like that. I'm getting the numbers wrong. You'd be able to scale way up. This is the kind of thing at 1.0 that would have taken a year if it had ever happened. And the team did it in like two or three weeks. It was really exciting and inspiring to see. Like, I didn't work on that, but I watched her from the outside. I'm like, wow, with this tiny team, motivated behind a big goal that was like, Hey guys, it's not like are we going to do this? We are going to do this. I've definitely come to appreciate just how lean something can be and not just get by but actually thrive because it's that lean.
