> There are probably less than 20 YC companies that have reached the point where this advice is valid. Zenefits, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe etc.
This advice is useful to basically every startup that has raised an A round, or is >= 10 people. That list is significantly larger than 20.
Management and HR problems start significantly earlier than Stripe size (200? 300?). They start at around 10 people, and this article matches my own experiences with useful advice to founders.
> most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.
Which part, precisely is flawed? Frequent, clear communication and proper delegation are almost so true as to be tautological. Most founders don't go wrong because they don't agree that these are valuable, they go wrong by forgetting to do them.
>There is very little management in the beginning, and that actually works well. When there are fewer than ~20 employees, most companies have everyone report to the founder. That’s optimal in the early stage.
And throughout the article he makes the point to caveat his advice by saying it doesn't apply to small companies. That is really solid and is kind of the difference IMO between advice YC gives and most other startup/business advice.
Where I think (and I believe the OP thinks) that this article could be strengthened is in the beginning by reiterating how important it is to make sure the company has product market fit before addressing any of the advice in the article. YC does a nice job of hammering that in many other posts.
I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that.
My guess is that someone at YC is reading my post here and saying... "All that goes without saying". But, it is such a common mistake that I don't think it goes without saying.
At the end of the day, the article is valuable. I just wish that product/market fit had been hammered as the standard instead of headcount.
> I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that.
Yes, if you're not at product/market fit, then as a business getting to product/market fit is probably the most important thing. However, people problems always crop up when you have people involved, and your people problems will be largely uncorrelated to whether the business has product/market fit. (It's not likely that you will have fewer people problems because the business doesn't have PMF).
The article could probably be made more clear that this isn't a 'list of things to do after you're successful', it's more a 'common failure patterns we see in companies with headcount > X'. And of course, there's the unstated advice, which is 'try to avoid having large headcount until after PMF'.
This advice is useful to basically every startup that has raised an A round, or is >= 10 people. That list is significantly larger than 20.
Management and HR problems start significantly earlier than Stripe size (200? 300?). They start at around 10 people, and this article matches my own experiences with useful advice to founders.
> most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.
Which part, precisely is flawed? Frequent, clear communication and proper delegation are almost so true as to be tautological. Most founders don't go wrong because they don't agree that these are valuable, they go wrong by forgetting to do them.