You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

• Startup founders appear to be working in a more natural way than those with “regular jobs”

• Humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups; typical for large companies to have thousands of employees, but broken up into small groups in a tree structure

  • The difference between a company with 100 vs 10,000 employees can be felt, even when you’re locally surrounded by a group of ~10

• Likens the artificial, terrible-to-eat food that is the norm of today to the comfortable path of working for a tech company like Google or Microsoft.

• Big company drawbacks are extra hard on programmers since lines of code aren’t generally repetitive; once written, it doesn’t need to be written again. Developers get strapped down by legacy code and restrictions on what they get to work on.

• Obstacles downstream propagate upstream; example used is: when you aren’t able to implement your own new ideas, you stop having them. The opposite is also true.

• Freedom scales with company size:

  “You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size of company you work for. If you start the company, you’ll have the most freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees you’ll have almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company with 100 people will feel different from one with 1000.”

• Companies can try to stay small, hire the best people, avoid bloat. Individuals can do the same, and avoid working for large organizations.

• Paul’s advice for graduating seniors would be to work for another company (but only a small one) if you want to, or start your own.

Note: pg is the founder of YCombinator, an organization that seeds startups. His opinion on this topic is to be taken with a grain of salt.