CHAPTER 10
Right-Sizing
Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)Julius Caesar
Startups are never quite the size they should be. First they are too small to handle the opportunities in front of them, so they hire. Then they become too large to sustain themselves, so they need to shrink. While large corporations can survive with a bloated payroll for some time, the margin of acceptable error in a small technology company is tiny. If you don’t reduce your staff or you don’t do it quickly enough, chances are you will lose the entire company, not just a subset of your employees.
Each time we were ...
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