Alex Komoroske: observation

Transcript context

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That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan, coda.io/lenny. Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier, slime molds, I want to spend a little time here. So interestingly enough, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is I did a newsletter post with the company Perplexity about how they build product. And as they were describing how they organized their team, the co-founders described they organized like slime mold, and he linked to your deck about slime molds and I was like, "What the heck is this?" Can you just briefly describe what you mean when you talk about slime molds and how slime molds are related to the way companies are organized and how they should think of the organization? Yeah. The main thesis of the slime mold deck is that the core dynamic that makes organizations hard to navigate as they get larger, even if you assume everyone is actively good at what they do, actively collaborative and actively hardworking, is this emergent force or coordination of finding the subset of projects to work on when everyone's super busy that everyone agrees and commits to and actually works on together. And finding this coordination cost grows with the square of the number of people who are working on that thing. And so what companies typically try to do is fight this or ignore that it exists. If you're going to fight it, the one way to look at this is think of a company like a vehicle. When the company is very small, you can drive it, you can steer it like a sports car. As a founder, you are allowed to steer. Everyone acknowledges you are allowed to steer. They're never, "Why is he steering it that way?" So you, a founder, can help navigate an organization around an obstacle the organization cannot see or comprehend itself. The problem is as you steer, as you grow into the size, your organization goes from a sports car and you grow into the size of a big rig, if you drive a big rig like a sports car, you're going to be a danger to yourself and others on the road and you're going to grind the engine. And so you got to drive the car that you actually have. So what I see a lot of things happen in large organizations, that people are just trying to ignore this fact. And when you drive, by the way, a car, your vehicle, like a big rig, when it is a big rig, people go, "Oh, it means to go slow." No, no, no. It means pivot less. It means have a little bit more... Be more intentional about the times that you adjust the steering, invest more in program management, invest more in processes, give a little bit more slack in the planning process to absorb any kind of surprising things that you can still all reach the product launch at the same time. The other option you can do is you can split your thing up into a series a swarm of sports cars, individual sports cars. And the downside of this, you'll get the autonomy and strengths of the bottom-up, the downside is other people will externally will look at it and go, "Well, that team and that team clearly didn't talk." You'll say, "Yep, yep." You have to decide how bad that is for you. Apple has chosen the former. It's very important to them to have the illusion of perfect coherence in their products. It worked very well for them. They executed marvelously. And if you also picked the exact opposite thing, everyone else is like, "Yeah. There are like 15 different ways of doing everything. They clearly don't talk to each other." But it allows the overall swarm of the AWS product suite to be very powerful and anti-fragile or whatever you want to say. 5 different ways of doing everything. They clearly don't talk to each other." But it allows the overall swarm of the AWS product suite to be very powerful and anti-fragile or whatever you want to say. And so slime molds, I think, is acknowledging that organizations are, especially ones that focus on autonomy and agency of their individual employees, which is a lot of tech companies, they are more like slime molds than we realize. And if you fight that fact, you're going to have a bad time. And if you embrace it, then you can start realizing slime molds are actually kind of amazing. They can find solutions to problems you didn't even know you were searching for.…

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