On company size

When Musk came into Twitter and started firing people by the thousands it brought a lot of attention to how many employees and contractors Twitter actually had. In the case of Twitter, I have no idea how many employees is the right number for them to have.

Fried shared this post looking at company size and various competitors that they have for Basecamp. Not surprisingly, 37 Signals is markedly smaller but at a size that is competitive with these other organizations.

My main thought on this article though is that it again makes one of the biggest mistakes I see in business comparison. Comparisons are made based on total revenue, at the expense of growth rate.

If I want to learn from other companies, I want to first know their growth rate. Other metrics are interesting, but if you grow at a rate much slower of faster than I am, I likely have little to learn.

In fairness, Twitter also isn't growing that fast so that isn't a reason for them to have a lot of staff.