Scaling Challenges Quotes

What works at scale may be different from scaling what works. Pilots often succeed, while scale-up often fails when the context changes.

I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.

When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.

As an entrepreneur, in many ways it's like looking into the crystal ball for what my company will hopefully go through as it starts to think about bigger challenges - scaling internationally, getting ready to go public, and all those different things.

As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn't. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.

Users and entrepreneurs building new business models off the blockchain means that there are competing interests on how best to scale the network. Linux, also an open source software project, had similar growing pains.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

When I became commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, I was leading thousands of individuals, from Special Forces to the broader interagency effort. I quickly realized that while we had the most best and most effective operators and small teams in the world, we were unable to scale.

Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don't think so.

When we first started growing our employees, I was scared. I would often think, 'If we had more people, what would they do? Is there really enough work?'

Making an average pitch to average people, or having an average gala for average people isn't going to scale anymore. You've got to find the people who care. Those people are worth all of your time.

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

In general, a lot of content creators find that their success is unable to support any sort of organization of scale. It's pretty difficult to support even three or four employees.

A lot of scaling up a company is not very sexy or strategic.

Very, very few podcasts have made it to scale, and to me, that says this business will never be big.