[sneak]

> "don't try to behave like companies much bigger than you"

This is such good advice for organizations at all stages. As a consultant I spend a lot of time talking startups and small companies out of hobbling themselves by adopting policies they think they have to simply because they're a corporation, when those policies only make sense when you have at a minimum hundreds of people involved in the org.

Everything from k8s to nosql to overly restrictive security policies. The Netflix employee handbook/guide really drove this point home to me. When you're small, and you're hiring well, you can afford to actually delegate real responsibility to your staff and let them use their judgement. Not everything needs to be a hard and fast rule until and unless there's an unacceptable level of risk or a demonstrated problem at hand.

[tempestn]

This relates to dealing with people too. A few times I've hired people who seemed to have good interpersonal skills, for people-facing roles. But for some reason, as soon as they were sending an email on behalf of the company, ie. to a customer or supplier, suddenly they're communicating like a soulless corporate automaton. Like, you don't have to pretend to be a cog in a massive corporation; no one actually likes receiving that kind of communication! Perhaps at a certain scale, when you're employing thousands of customer service agents, you'll need them to follow a strict script to maintain quality control. (Or maybe not.) But it's certainly not necessary at a company with single or double digit employees.