| I was thinking more like partnerships in law firms, but even to the extent that everyone is an equal equity partner. Each partner would very carefully evaluate if adding a new person is worth it, and contributions would be closely watched. It would not end politics but at least it would be fairer Coase's original idea was of course that firms had employees because the cost of finding someone to do the flexible changing work out in the market was too complex. But add process automation, industry ledgers and a few other bits and I am pretty sure optimal firm size could shrink. Add in whatever magic sauce people are talking about here (the ability to measure an IC actual contribution - or avoid it altogether through small enough equity) and form size might have a real downward driver. I suspect that SaaS will see a shift to open source as well. for example even top tech firms spend a fortune building and maintaining custom code for non-core operations (ie HR and reporting and MIS reporting) Almost all of this can be done well in oss and well enough that if you change your procedures to meet the code you probably win So with most companies operating on free codebases, sharing equity to drive out the need for managers, keeping employee numbers low, and being able to program / automate most of their non core work firms sizes might take a dive. |