Every few years there’s a startup that loudly proclaims it has “solved” management in some new way. Big-A agile, holocracy, etc etc etc.

Here’s the thing. It’s easy when you’re small. But like the man said, don’t get cocky, kid.

The Linden path to Brownian Motion

We fell into this trap at Linden. We spent our first 3 years pushing with a really small, relatively senior, tight group and — shocker — managing was easy. We succeeded. We went through nearly a year 7% week-over-week growth in daily actives, changed the conversations around the metaverse, and grew like crazy.

We were also deeply curious about what we didn’t know. We were a culture of questioners, we welcomed academics and professionals who knew more than we did about anything. Larry asked us the profound question that led to us granting IP rights to users. Constance helped us understand why in-world tools were so key to participation. And Tom gave us a framework to discuss distributed decision making and unconventional management.

We were so ready for these ideas. In the early days, the most important projects and tasks were up on a whiteboard and you’d just put your name by the one you were working on.

Lossy cultural compression

As we grew, we wanted to keep those norms, so we tried to encode them. Unfortunately, culture is best communicated as bumper stickers and bumper stickers necessarily lose context. “Choose your own work” became the mantra, losing the context of “choose your own work (from the most important tasks).”

This loss compounded another scaling problem: high transparency and many-to-many — O(n^2) — communication habits. It became very challenging to understand whether work was really having positive company impact. Neither employees nor managers could really answer the question.

This became the source of debate and friction that Philip and I were never able to resolve. We fractured, Linden soon lost both of us, and the company stumbled at just the wrong moment, never recovering the momentum everyone had worked so hard to build.

Better solutions

Having now led great companies through many different layers of scaling — 5 to 350, 1500 to 10,000, 80,000 - 180,000 — it’s pretty clear that while there is no singular answer, which is why it’s so funny when tiny startups claim to have cracked it.

Things that will help at any scale:

Be obsessed with outcomes. Make it so easy for everyone to see the impact of their work on the company’s mission and priorities that it’s the default way everyone thinks and talks about their work. Let managers amplify those signals rather than relying on them to make the connection. Facebook in during and just after the mobile transition rocked at this. O11y is a tool here. AI will be, too.
Focus on as much speed and simplicity as your mission can accept. The cheaper it is to learn, the faster you can implement those lessons, the more resilient your teams, divisions, and managers are to scaling loads. How to accomplish differs for every org, but don’t let the natural tendency to think of your challenges as unique stop this.
Recognize that training leaders and managers is real work and absolutely required as more of your net company effort goes into helping people and teams succeed. The ROI of great versions of these programs versus the default mail-it-in version is hard to overstate.