(2010-08-15) Horowitz Scaling Company

Ben Horowitz suggests how to scale your Start Up. In this post, I will discuss the basics of scaling an organization. In doing so, I will lay out the fundamentals, but not go as far as writing a how-to guide. Hopefully, this will give you the context to apply the myriad of scaling techniques in the management literature appropriately. I will save for later posts more advanced topics....At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly. The first scale technique to implement is specialization...

• Jason Kolb has some cool ideas about baking processes into your product/ecosystem.
  • Baking the organization into the product. When we sold Latigent to Cisco, we had kind of a cool customer support process that would email us immediately if any problems occurred while customers were using the software. We'd call them and tell them we were working on the problem while they were still trying again.
  • Using specialized systems as soon as possible. It's tempting to put off setting up a CRM system, a bug tracking system, all sorts of things that you don't immediately need. But if they're not there then you can't very well bake them into your products, can you? And the transition down the road will completely disrupt whatever you'd rather be working on. Outsourcing the setup will make your life easier down the road as well.
  • Write like crazy. This is actually one thing that I did pretty well last time. I would just crank out all kinds of documents while building the product: cool feature lists, how tos, tips and tricks, developer docs. Some of these ended up being used in sales, all of them were loved by customers. And it has consistently saved me a TON of time that I would have needed to spend supporting the sales team, support team, etc. If it's not obvious, throw it into a document. You will thank yourself and so will the rest of the organization as you bring them on board. Org Writing Practices

Aug26: Ben continues with some practices for minimizing political Game Playing in your company (Start Up?). Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. Smells like pseudo-ScientificManagement. I Commented: This sounds like an attempt to take the variable humanity out of an organization. It even isolates the CEO from his own executive team. I think W L Gore and SemCo offer different models. I'm not sure how well they may scale to companies with lots of innovation/uncertainty, but then I'm not sure that yours does either.