The hypothesis I jumped to was “scaling up well takes time”.
Even if you hire people who have the potential to be good advisors, who are advising people with the potential to be “tier-1”, trying to, say, quadruple the number of advisors within a year would strain 80K’s attention and could bring about many difficulties (interpersonal clashes, message drift, dropping non-advisory projects because advisors require managerial time for supervision, increased pressure on the operations team...).
The rule of thumb I’ve heard in various CEO interviews is that an organization’s nature fundamentally changes when it triples in size. 80K has ten full-time staff at the moment (counting their team page plus one person who hasn’t been added yet), but if only a couple of those are advisors, tripling the size of the advisory team might change a lot.
Not that I’m saying “concern with difficulty around scaling up” is 80K’s only motivation; I’d just guess that it’s roughly as important as difficulty finding good advisors.
We think the question of how fast to hire is very difficult and we’re constantly debating it. Currently we think that five per year is manageable and will help us grow. Much above five per year, and most of our time would be spent hiring and there would be risks to the culture. Much below that seems like a failure to adequately grow our team capacity.
Still not sure about the importance of this vs. other factors, though.
The hypothesis I jumped to was “scaling up well takes time”.
Even if you hire people who have the potential to be good advisors, who are advising people with the potential to be “tier-1”, trying to, say, quadruple the number of advisors within a year would strain 80K’s attention and could bring about many difficulties (interpersonal clashes, message drift, dropping non-advisory projects because advisors require managerial time for supervision, increased pressure on the operations team...).
In my experience, scaling teams is fairly straightforward when total team size remains under 15.
(And it probably retains much of this straightforwardness for as long as the total firm size is under 150, Dunbar’s number.)
The rule of thumb I’ve heard in various CEO interviews is that an organization’s nature fundamentally changes when it triples in size. 80K has ten full-time staff at the moment (counting their team page plus one person who hasn’t been added yet), but if only a couple of those are advisors, tripling the size of the advisory team might change a lot.
Not that I’m saying “concern with difficulty around scaling up” is 80K’s only motivation; I’d just guess that it’s roughly as important as difficulty finding good advisors.
Just found a relevant line from the review:
Still not sure about the importance of this vs. other factors, though.
Thanks, I missed that!