I added people and we grew slower: The thing no one trained me for
A few years into my last company, we got bought. And suddenly the only thing that mattered was growth.
So I did the obvious thing. I added people. I spent more on marketing. More power, more growth — right?
We grew less. Our growth actually got slower. I added more, and I got less out. And I could not understand why.
It took me years and honestly, losing that company to understand what was really going on. It’s the one thing no one warns you about the moment you start adding people. And if you lead a team, even a small one, it might be the most useful thing I can tell you.
The advice everyone gives you
Here’s what you’re taught: you need growth, so you add people and you add marketing. More hands, more money, more results. It feels obvious. It’s also where it quietly goes wrong.
Because when you have a team, the real work isn’t only the tasks. It’s keeping everyone on the same page, everyone knowing what the others are doing. And here’s the part no one tells you: when you add people, the connections between them don’t add up. They multiply.
Why adding people slows growth: the hidden math
Count the one-to-one connections a team has to keep aligned and the number climbs fast:
- 3 people → 3 connections
- 10 people → 45
- 20 people → 190
- 50 people → 1,225
I went from three connections to over a thousand. And I was still trying to run the company the same way I ran it with three.
Adding people doesn’t just add hands. It adds confusion, faster than it adds output. And that’s the thing no one trained you for.
There’s even a name for it. A computer scientist named Fred Brooks wrote it down in 1975, in a book called The Mythical Man-Month. It’s called Brooks’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Because every new person has to be trained, talked to, and kept in the loop, and that costs more than the work they bring. I lived that law for years without knowing it had a name.
What it looked like for me
My first real company, I started alone. Over five years I grew it to about twenty people. And it worked — because it was slow. I could still hold the whole thing in my head. I could still work on the product myself.
Then we got bought, and growth became everything. So I did what you’re supposed to do: I hired more people, and I poured money into marketing.
And we grew slower than before.
I couldn’t believe it. So the next year, we did the opposite. We made the team smaller. And growth went up again. Same market. Same product. Fewer people more growth.
Why smart founders keep doing this
There’s a name for my mistake too. It’s called premature scaling — growing too fast, before the business is ready. The largest study we have on why startups die, covering thousands of companies, found premature scaling is the number one cause of early failure. The startups that do it end up with teams about three times too big for their stage.
So why do smart founders keep doing it? A book called The E-Myth calls it the technician’s trap. Because you’re good at the work — the product, the selling — you assume the answer is always more of the work. More people on it, more money on it. But the business doesn’t need more work. It needs to be held together. And more people doesn’t hold it together. It pulls it apart.
The part I missed: your job changed
Here’s the deeper thing I didn’t see. When you cross that line, your job changes — and no one tells you.
Andy Grove, the man who built Intel, said it simply in High Output Management: once you lead people, your results are not what you make with your own hands. They’re what your whole team produces. Your job stops being “do the work” and becomes “make everyone’s work fit together.”
I never made that switch. I kept trying to build the product myself, while a thousand connections quietly fell apart behind me.
And this is why it’s so hard for founders. Research by Noam Wasserman found that half of founders are no longer CEO of their own company by year three, and four out of five are eventually pushed out. Not because they got worse but because the job turned into one they were never trained for, and they kept doing the old one.
This doesn’t mean “don’t grow”
I don’t want you to read this as a warning against growing. That’s not it at all.
It means the work is not the same anymore. You can’t do things the way you used to. Your job now is to keep everyone on the same page — to make sure the team is moving in the same direction and to watch over the product instead of building every part of it yourself. That’s not losing control. That is the job. I just wish someone had told me while I still had the company.
One thing to notice this week
Catch yourself doing a piece of work that someone on your team should own. Don’t even fix it just notice it. Because every time you do their work, you’re not doing yours: keeping everyone connected. That small moment of catching yourself is where it starts.
What I’m building now
Everything I just described — the hidden mess when you add people, the job quietly changing under you — is what I’m spending the next years of my life on. After all of this, I started a company called Teracrowd. We’re building a chief of staff for your team: something that talks to your people, finds what’s getting in the way, and helps clear it so you can lead the work instead of doing all of it.
If any of this felt familiar, you’re not doing it wrong. The game changed, and no one handed you the new rules. That’s what this whole series is here to fix one hidden thing at a time.
FAQ
Why does adding more people sometimes slow a team down? Because the work of a team isn’t only the tasks — it’s keeping everyone aligned. The number of connections between people grows much faster than the number of people. Three people have 3 connections; ten people have 45; fifty people have 1,225. Past a point, each new person adds more coordination cost than output. This is known as Brooks’s Law.
What is premature scaling? Premature scaling means growing one part of your company — usually headcount or marketing spend — faster than the business is actually ready for. The largest study on startup failure found it’s the most common reason young companies die. Teams that scale too early often end up about three times larger than their stage justifies.
How does a founder’s job change as the team grows? Early on, a founder succeeds by doing the work. As the team grows, the job becomes keeping everyone’s work aligned and building things that run without you. As Andy Grove put it, your output becomes what your whole team produces, not what you make yourself. Founders who don’t make this shift often become the bottleneck.
What should I do first if my team feels stuck as it grows? Start by noticing where you are still the one doing or deciding things your team could own. Those moments are the signal that your role needs to change from doing the work to connecting it. Small shifts — letting one decision sit with someone else — are where it begins.
