| > Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team. A 10-person company inherently has a fairly high level of autonomy; the outside world can impose broad constraints but there's a pretty low limit on how much you can interfere in day-to-day activity when you're not in the building. It's conceivable that a 10-person team in a group of 100 could have that much autonomy, but it's extremely rare IME - e.g. I've never known a 10-person team within a 100-person company to have the authority to hire at will; it's rare for a team to be allowed to change hosting providers without that decision being made at higher level. > Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it? Leaving aside that most contributors are paid by employers to work on those projects, unpaid contributors to those projects won't be in the kind of boss-team relationship Graham is criticising. Open-source contributors inherently have a much higher level of autonomy because there's no "the company pays your salary" dynamic. > Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses? Yes, exactly. (Specific subprojects within them might still be inspiring) > If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? They do, all the time; the normal business lifecycle is that an innovative company outcompetes the bloated incumbent, but gradually bloats up itself, until a smaller, more innovative company outcompetes it. |