[vonkow]

I'm really surprised that the author didn't get into one of the main ways a fortress fails. It's humming along smoothly and then suddenly the population doubles in size when a group of settlers (VC cash) arrives and the whole place goes to hell from disorganization and growing pains.

[DonHopkins]

Jamie Zawinski describes it as how a few people who want to work to make a company successful eventually attract a whole bunch of people who want to work for a successful company.

[yeukhon]

Would love to hear honest story telling from really successful startup including FB, Dropbox and even some of the smaller players on this.

Would it make sense to just go full hacker culture like FB from the beginning without any serious management layer and goes small team instead of big team?

[patmcguire]

Best you're going to get is a Rashomon-style retelling. Anybody early on has retold the story so many times - pitching new hires, onboarding the next wave of employees, and then the next wave, and then the next wave - that they probably don't really remember the real thing very clearly anymore.

Then there's also the pressure to agree to a similar narrative, not necessarily in a bad way, just like any couple has agreed on a how they met story, they've been telling it for so long and had the arguments about "did that happen?" that the story has been set. Who knows what happened.

You'd have to assemble a collage of The Official Story, some of the weirder first interviews the group gave in the press, early non-hires who interviewed and caught a glimpse of a weird snapshot, the inevitable disgruntled folk (who may not inevitably wrong).

Aside from that, I do like http://justinkan.com/three-stories , it's a good series of disasters.

[smaddox]

A bit of duplicated effort due to inadequate communication is far better than subgroups being forced to use outside systems that they can't modify to automate common tasks.