The Moving Goal Posts of Tech Companies

I was the pub the other night with some friends who have worked at companies of various sizes, from tiny startups to huge enterprises, and we got talking about company culture and how things change over time. Something interested me about that conversation because I think it highlighted that bigger companies don't always have it better and I'd like to capture part of that here.

A bunch of Davids

There's a only a handful of BIG Australian tech companies, leading many tech startups and scale-ups naturally look up at those big players and think "wow - when we get to their size, things will be great!"

That mindset is honestly pretty reasonable too if you think about it. A bigger company means more money, more staff, and that should mean less work for any one individual person - leading to more time to tackle issues that were descoped or make a great, but non-functional impact overall. During my time at GROW, I have definitely felt this mindset of "Once we're a Goliath like /them/, we can start to fix these problems properly!" setting in over time and it honestly helped me through the lead-ups to client go-lives and related projects.

It's hard in that mindset to imagine that the Goliath you're chasing sees themselves as a David on the global stage - and they're still in the same mindset as the David you work for now.

If your company is skilled, funded, and lucky enough all at the same time; you might become a Goliath. You'll probably lose some talented employees and managers along the way because the culture has changed but that's ok - you're a Goliath now and nothing is going to stop you.

There's only so many possible Goliaths

Being a Goliath is not easy and it is certainly not cheap. There's co-ordination cost at every junction and every layer of management, and there's only so much oversight of a project someone can have from 30,000ft before the clouds get in the way. These issues obviously can be mitigated to some extent by skilled managers and passionate employees, but those are circumstantial qualities and don't scale well as demand for your product(s) increase.

When you're 15ft tall, every door looks like it was made for someone's pet

Eventually, you hit a point of rigidity and inflexibility because every movement is expensive. Pivots don't happen opportunistically anymore but in response to downturns and missed obligations, roadmaps turn into timelines and eventually deadlines, and the churn-and-burn of the tech "cult-porate" sets in.

From talking with people at companies at this stage; the mindset is eerily familiar, "once we're the size of Google, Microsoft, etc. then we can start to fix these problems properly!"

You need to eat a lot of food to be the size of a Goliath, and there's only so much food to go around.

And so the cycle repeats itself

You hire more people, you build more products, you add more procedures and streamline more processes and eventually; if you're lucky, you're now a global Goliath - one of the largest tech companies in the world - all your problems should be solved right?

Wrong! All the small problems you said you'd be able to come back to later; they're actually quirks of your platform now, and changing them breaks countless integrations that have been built on top of it so they're descoped - again.

The cycle is pretty clear. You aspire to change the world, get big enough to do it, you aspire to change the world more, sell part of your company soul/identity to grow big enough to do it, realise growing bigger solved none of the problems that prevented you from your aspirations

There's nothing wrong with being a David

Why do so many companies fall into the trap of becoming a Goliath? Because they have to to survive. Startups are almost always looking for more funding because money solves most problems quicker, but worse, than any other resource can.

Like most of our modern world's problems, this too stems from late-stage Capitalism. Venture Capitalists push every company they fund to follow the same trajectory; a hockey stick curve, even if that trajectory makes no sense for the company's philosophy.

You either die a Startup, or live long enough to see yourself become Microsoft.

Short-term decisions are made by the business sectors of Startups and Scale-ups that negatively affect the day-to-day lives of the people who build and maintain their product. In turn, those people leave faster than new people can be trained and eventually code becomes sacred, bugs become features, and your platform becomes inexplicably linked with expletives from your users' mouths. They're not using your products because they make their lives easier, they're using it because that's they were told to use.

Committing to being a David; as hard as it is to achieve in our economic climate, produces great products that positively affect the lives of thousands of people a day. Without the overhead of being a Goliath, you can iterate faster and challenge multiple Goliaths in different industries at the same time. You grow as your products necessitate rather than because somebody wants a return on their investment.

In conclusion

Unless you're the biggest company in the world; you're a David compared to someone. It's very alluring to think you just have to make that next milestone and then all your problems will be gone, but Capitalism has proven that isn't the case.

Money doesn't solve the types of problems that make people want to grow bigger, it only makes them more expensive to solve.