As you scale a team or delegate more, communication overhead and misalignments will inherently reduce efficiency. This is a fundamental trade-off. The goal isn't perfect efficiency; it's greater total output, which requires a higher tolerance for these diseconomies of scale.
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The primary reason people fail to delegate is the correct belief that they can do a task faster and better themselves the first time. The key is to accept this initial time cost as a necessary investment in long-term leverage and compounding efficiency, rather than a reason to avoid delegating.
As startups hire and add structure, they create a natural pull towards slower, more organized processes—a 'slowness gravity'. This is the default state. Founders must consciously and continuously fight this tendency to maintain the high-velocity iteration that led to their initial success.
Scaling a team is not a linear process. Each time a company's number of employees doubles (e.g., from 5 to 10, then to 20), its operational structure, processes, and even strategy must be completely re-evaluated. This forces a difficult transition from generalized roles to specialized functions.
If hiring more people isn't increasing output, it's likely because you're adding 'ammunition' (individual contributors) without adding 'barrels' (the key people or projects that enable work). To scale effectively, you must increase the number of independent workstreams, not just the headcount within them.
According to the 'dark side' of Metcalfe's Law, each new team member exponentially increases the number of communication channels. This hidden cost of complexity often outweighs the added capacity, leading to more miscommunication and lost information. Improving operational efficiency is often a better first step than hiring.
Gamma's CEO resists the pressure to scale headcount aggressively, arguing that doubling the team size does not guarantee double the speed. He believes a smaller, more agile team can change direction faster, which is more valuable than raw speed in a rapidly evolving market.
As companies grow from 30 to 200 people, they naturally become slower. A CEO's critical role is to rebuild the company's operating model, deliberately balancing bottom-up culture with top-down strategic planning to regain speed and ensure everyone is aligned.
Every change introduces a temporary performance decrease as the team adapts—an 'implementation dip.' This guaranteed loss often outweighs the uncertain potential gain from minor tweaks. Real growth comes from compounding skill through repetition of a working system, not from perpetual optimization.
Business growth isn't linear. Scaling up introduces novel challenges in complexity, cost, and logistics that were non-existent at a smaller size. For example, doubling manufacturing capacity creates new shipping and specialized hiring problems that leadership must anticipate and solve.
Contrary to the "grow at all costs" mindset, early inefficiencies become permanently embedded in a company's culture. To build a truly scalable business, founders must bake in efficiency from day one, for example by perfecting the sales playbook themselves before hiring a single salesperson to avoid institutionalizing bad habits.
