In my previous EdTech startup, ConceptOwl, I found one day that new videos were not showing up on our app even though we were recording dozens of them every week.
Why? Manpower problem. We had too many people!
I found that there were too many steps in the video production, and if one guy in the chain was unavailable, the process stopped. So I removed all the unnecessary people and steps, and soon, everything started flowing.
In another company, the large team size on a project not only slowed us down but made it hard to do good work. In any discussion, everybody would say something to do some ‘value add.’ And you couldn’t ignore it, no matter how stupid it was.
So you had to dance around and get work done without ruffling anyone’s feathers. That is how we create corporate politicians.
That is also why big companies make clumsy products while a small startup builds something great with 1% of the resources.
You cannot just throw lots of money at a problem and hope to build great things.
Sometimes, less is truly more.
– Rajan