Interlude - Index of

Hypergrowth | 65
doubling to a billion was possible. The rules are probably different
for different industries, so before the offsite meeting,
I researched tech companies that sold computing equipment
into data centers, as we did, and I derived some rules of revenue
growth:
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You can reach $100 million within a year of shipping
product.
Beyond $100 million, doubling annually is the best you
can do.
Beyond $1 billion, 50 percent annual growth is the
maximum.
You must also consider growth in terms of people. A rough
rule of thumb for tech companies is $500,000 in revenue per
employee, so a $100 million company needs two hundred people.
At that size, the largest groups are engineering and sales,
each with fifty to seventy people.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond describes different
types of societies. The band is the smallest, with only
a few dozen members, and Diamond argues that “the band is
the political, economic, and social organization that we inherited
from our millions of years of evolutionary history. Our
developments beyond it all took place within the last few tens
of thousands of years.”
I believe it is no coincidence that the group size of our
evolutionary history matches the maximum group size that
can form easily and spontaneously in a company. A few dozen
people can all fit in a lunchroom to talk and plan and form a
team. Beyond that, growth becomes more painful. That’s not
to say it’s impossible, but it is unnatural and takes hard work.
If you double annually, then half of your employees have been