There is also overhead to scaling and difficulty aligning goals that they want to avoid. (As above, I think my Ribbonfarm post makes this clear.) Once you get bigger, the only way to ensure alignment is to monitor—trust, but verify. And verification is a large part of why management is so costly—it takes time away from actually doing work, it is pure overhead for the manager, and even then, it’s not foolproof.
When you’re small, on the other hand, high-trust is almost unnecessary, because the entire org is legible, and you can see that everyone is (or isn’t) buying in to the goals. In typical startups, they are also well aligned because they all have similar levels of payoff if things go really well.
There is also overhead to scaling and difficulty aligning goals that they want to avoid. (As above, I think my Ribbonfarm post makes this clear.) Once you get bigger, the only way to ensure alignment is to monitor—trust, but verify. And verification is a large part of why management is so costly—it takes time away from actually doing work, it is pure overhead for the manager, and even then, it’s not foolproof.
When you’re small, on the other hand, high-trust is almost unnecessary, because the entire org is legible, and you can see that everyone is (or isn’t) buying in to the goals. In typical startups, they are also well aligned because they all have similar levels of payoff if things go really well.