Keep It at 15 People
Someone told Naval Ravikant that AngelList was a serious company. That it could only grow from here. 50 people. 100 people. Naval pushed back hard.
He wanted to keep it small. Not because he was lazy. Because large companies have two problems: they don't innovate, and they're not fun to work at. Too much coordination. Too hard to move.
"Large companies don't innovate. Large groups don't innovate. I'm a lousy manager. Keep it under 30 people."
The Curse
Here's Naval's logic. A bigger company needs a bigger business model. A bigger business model means you extract more from your users. More extraction means lower quality. It's a death spiral.
He pointed to Digg vs Reddit. Digg's community suffered because they needed to monetize aggressively to appease their VCs. Reddit didn't have that pressure. Reddit's community survived.
"One of the problems of creating a large company is you need to find a large business model. You tax the environment more. Your quality goes down."
Don't Become a Slave to the Burn
Naval's rule: stay lean enough that you never compromise the integrity of the product. At 10 people, there's no chance of that happening. You monetize easily. No one gets hurt.
Extra money wouldn't change Naval's life. So he chose impact over growth. Keep AngelList simple. Make the ecosystem more efficient. Give away every ounce of value instead of extracting it.
"The leaner and smaller we are, the less money we have to make. The less irrational stuff we do that might hurt the community."