[aneesh]

Not necessarily. Even pg will agree that a lot of the things that make a startup so productive and exciting fundamentally break when you have 15,000+ people.

[apathy]

Even pg will agree that a lot of the things that make a startup so productive and exciting fundamentally break when you have 15,000+ people.

Well then, let's hear it from pg.

[pg]

They tend to in practice, but it may not be completely inevitable. Organizations have some control over how bureaucratic they become.

[daniel-cussen]

Nucor (18,000+ employees) comes to mind as a counterexample. But then, the exception proves the rule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor

[neilk]

I don't know if you meant it like this, but the original sense of "prove" was more like "test". That is, an apparent exception is a test of the rule's generality.

According to that wikipedia page, Nucor believes in decentralization and objective metrics, so they are indeed a good test of the rule. If that page is accurate, Nucor employees can't get very far on politics alone.