Who Cares If It Scales?

Rather than optimizing think about how you can get better at innovating

Across the country, in every accelerator, exec team meeting, advisor session, and board meeting, startups are asked the same question:

“But how will it scale?”

My answer: “Who cares?”

Whether you founded your company yesterday or you’ve been growing for years, the problem remains the same: the moment that you create a solution, whether it’s a piece of software or a business process, you start to feel pressure to optimize it. The questions come hard and fast:

• “But what happens when we grow 10X? We’d have to hire 20 people to do that work!”
• “What if we land five more clients like this one? The system will be too slow for them.”
• “If we’re still doing this in five years the company will be out of business.”
• “What if Elon Musk tweets about us? The site will crash in an instant!”

This urge to prematurely scale is almost entirely fear-based, a fear that’s ironically fed by a startup’s intense desire to succeed. When we pitch our companies to investors and customers we dream big, touting exponential growth rates and massive returns on investment. We dream of disrupting industries, not…