Full video<\/a><\/p>\n A few years into my last company, we got bought. And suddenly the only thing that mattered was growth.<\/p>\n So I did the obvious thing. I added people. I spent more on marketing. More power, more growth \u2014 right?<\/p>\n We grew less. Our growth actually got slower. I added more, and I got less out. And I could not understand why.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Count the one-to-one connections a team has to keep aligned and the number climbs fast:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. It’s called Brooks’s Law<\/strong>: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n My first real company, I started alone. Over five years I grew it to about twenty people. And it worked \u2014 because it was slow. I could still hold the whole thing in my head. I could still work on the product myself.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And we grew slower than before.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0 more growth.<\/p>\n There’s a name for my mistake too. It’s called premature scaling<\/strong> \u2014 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<\/a>. The startups that do it end up with teams about three times too big for their stage.<\/p>\n So why do smart founders keep doing it? A book called The E-Myth<\/em> calls it the technician’s trap. Because you’re good at the work \u2014 the product, the selling \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Here’s the deeper thing I didn’t see. When you cross that line, your job changes \u2014 and no one tells you.<\/p>\n Andy Grove, the man who built Intel, said it simply in High Output Management<\/em>: 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.”<\/p>\n I never made that switch. I kept trying to build the product myself, while a thousand connections quietly fell apart behind me.<\/p>\nThe advice everyone gives you<\/h3>\n
Why adding people slows growth: the hidden math<\/h3>\n
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What it looked like for me<\/h3>\n
Why smart founders keep doing this<\/h3>\n
The part I missed: your job changed<\/h3>\n