ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Graham claims that for the majority of companies, the true chaos of scaling (and also the formation of most of your company’s identity) happens roughly between 30 and 750 people. Atfer that milestone, the scaling emotions are more team-oriented rather than company-oriented — like “Wow, now engineering is growing so fast!” vs. “Facebook is growing so fast!” These phases and how to handle them apply to team scale as well. 30 to 50 Employees “There’s something really interesting that happens when a company can’t ift around one table anymore — things just start to get a lot harder,” says Graham. “Where it used to be simple to communicate, people suddenly complain that they don’t know what’s going on anymore. They don’t know why you’re making certain decisions. They don’t know each other as well. They don’t know what they should be doing. I’ve seen so many companies really struggle in this phase.” 30 to 50 people is where you go from being a family to being a company, and everything starts to get really hard. With under 30 people, everyone knows each other well enough to walk up and strike up a conversation with practically anyone. You don’t even need to invest that much in communication. People can turn around in their chairs and talk to each other, and the priorities are clear because everyone’s talking about them all the time. “When things start to change at this tipping point, it’s the CEO who feels it most,” says Graham. “I’ve talked to a number of people who are experiencing this and they say it’s like night and day. At 50 people, everything that used to come naturally is now a struggle. And as a new leader, you start getting diiffcult questions that you’ve never had to answer before. I had a CEO tell me that someone asked them about their career path at the company, and they were like ‘I don’t know! Why are you asking that? We have so much to do!’ Or you have someone ask, ‘How do I do XYZ?’ and you want to say, ‘How do you not know that?!’ But it’s not their fault. Things have changed. You’re a company now — not just a team — and you have to start acting like one.” The best remedy here is to start writing things down — especially the stuff that’s never needed to be formal or oiffcial before, like mission, values, philosophies. (You can see more of Graham’s advice on how to approach writing these things down here.) “Who we are and how we do things — write that down as fast as you can before you hit rapid growth (ideally),” says Graham. “Yes, that might seem like a nuts thing to do at 25 59