In the Continental Telegraph, what looks to be a pretty solid characterization of the corporate life-cycle for technology firms:
There are generally, 6 stages in the life of a tech company:
- Inception. A couple of smart kids start something in a garage. Massive innovation.
- Fast growth. The business moves to some good offices, number of staff increases. They take on smart, fast moving people who are innovating big. A few people know them.
- Steady growth. The business is now something of a household name. They get their own small head office. Staff are more like normal business. Innovation continues, but the bureaucracy starts to grow.
- Bureaucracy. The business is a household name. They have multiple offices, or something designed by a smart-ass architect. There’s still staff coming in, but they’re mostly seeing it as a nice warm place to sit and be bureaucrats. The innovators start leaving as it’s just not interesting. They might even be making lots of money, but it’s mostly just living off what was built in earlier phases, or large dumb wasteful projects that go nowhere for years.
- Decline. A new disruptor arrives on the scene. They innovate in a field you’re involved in. You can’t keep up because in the previous phase, you replaced the innovators with bureaucrats. You’re outsmarted.
- Terminal decline and death. You slowly or quickly disappear, maybe holding onto a few customers who habitually use you.
I think there might also be something about when government starts taking an interest in you, and I think it’s quite some time into stage 4. Google are already there. Firing James Damore is very much bureaucracy state behaviour. They wouldn’t have cared when it was a tiny number of staff in an office. And how much have they really innovated in the last decade?
