[HN Gopher] Small Teams
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Small Teams
        
       Author : miletus
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2023-01-03 14:54 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (stevepulec.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (stevepulec.com)
        
       | adminu wrote:
       | The ARR for BuiltWith is probably off[1].
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322265
        
         | sparks1970 wrote:
         | Thanks for the link that leads to:
         | https://medium.com/@andrewjrogers/the-story-of-builtwith-e3b...
         | 
         | Main thing that comes out of it is "focus". Focus starts to
         | dissipate the larger the team. I don't think focus will
         | guarantee you success (you could be focused on the wrong thing)
         | but I don't think you can be successful without it.
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | The celebrity ones don't belong on the list. Barack Obama makes
       | lots of money as a speaker too, it's not because of some inherent
       | efficiency of small teams.
        
       | rattray wrote:
       | Nice. I wish all the examples included user/revenue/impact
       | numbers (like Instagram) rather than only investment/valuation
       | information (like Notion, WhatsApp, Kylie Jenner, etc)
        
       | tkrskxyz wrote:
       | Do those numbers also include any "contractors"? If not they are
       | meaningless.
        
       | 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
       | It would be interesting to see a list of unsuccessful small teams
       | as a point of reference. Oh wait... it probably wouldn't. Then
       | again, a list of unsuccesful large teams may not offer much
       | insight either.
       | 
       | There may be many advantages to small teams and yes there are
       | cases where they have wild financial success, but in general
       | these may just be outliers. Are these outliers because they have
       | the secret sauce worth emulating? Maybe, and maybe their stories
       | will show why they succeeded where so many failed. Success is
       | rarely all luck, but we'll likely also invent myths around their
       | exceptionalism as we tend to do. Not the type of exceptionalism
       | which precludes the rest of us from having a similar shot of
       | course, but one about cleverness and grit or other
       | characteristics we can fairly easily attribute to ourselves.
       | 
       | Everyone likes a good narrative, I suppose. And narratives about
       | scrappy small teams achieving success meritoriously are more
       | attractive than ones about how the massive organizations usually
       | tend to eat them for lunch (despite having their own types of
       | problems) or ones about the frequencies with which the scrappy
       | teams fail. Cherry-picking data points is the key to any good
       | narrative.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-01-04 23:00 UTC)