Patrick Collison explains why being consensus-oriented is a common startup mistake

Between say 5 and 50 people. I think we are much too consensus oriented. We of course weren't completely consensus oriented. I mean we couldn't have gotten anything done if we were. But I think we kind of biased too much in that direction. And I think that's a relatively common mistake. Right. There's no particular need for sort of formal decision making mechanisms. But then you kind of, you hit 15 people and now there is. And I think companies don't adjust quickly enough to sort of that, that new necessity again, very much us included. And so the high order piece of advice, and perhaps I'm over extrapolating from our personal experience, but the higher order advice just kind of reflecting back would be when you hit a certain size again, I'm just going to say 10 people for the sake of simplicity. Maybe it's a bit before, it's a bit after. I think you need to kind of adjust more deliberately to this kind of explicit communication model of being sort of quite firmly non consensus based. I mean nobody likes the idea of sort of being hierarchical. That sounds pejorative but like in some sense hierarchical. And there is this kind of delicate balancing act. On the one hand you want to sort of really prioritize speed and agility which involves being kind of somewhat hierarchical because those are sort of efficient ways to have shots get called. But on the other hand you really do want people to have this kind of strong ownership mentality and real sense that sort of they, they can cause things to change or identify problems or sort of inject new ideas even in unrelated areas. And so it's this sort of delicate act where how do you sort of facilitate enough autonomy and agency but also not have things devolve. And again, I really wish there was kind of the sort of rote simple, well just do X, Y and Z and you'll be good. But if such X, Y's and Z's exist, no one's told me yet.