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Comment by trcollinson | Hacker News Reader

As a theoretical experiment it’s interesting. But it would never ever work. You’d literally spend a year or more trying to prepare for that 100 days and I’m still not convinced you’d get anything out of it.

Now, if you were going to give me 6 people that would be a different story. With 6 people I have a number of startup ideas that I would love to work on and I think I could get a working mvp out of in 100 days.

As of today it would be around health care billing for small to medium sized US based medical practices encompassing ehr, billing, office management, and cash flow management. Not exciting but it’s what I’d be doing.

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You could make 16 teams of 6 and give each one a different startup idea. You could then create some metric for success and then choose to continue to work on the one with the most success.

That's great! You could secretly give some teams the same idea and compare approaches and results afterward.

I could. I’ve run very large development groups. It takes a lot of time and effort to get it right and with 16 groups of 6 it would be the same overhead, if not more. It just wouldn’t be for me, that’s all. I think I’d be much more successful with one strategic team of 6. If you can manage 16 teams working on projects for 100 days, by all means go for it.

Agreed. I have no idea how to manage 100 people, nor how to utilize 100 people in any effective way.

I guess I would be hacking the challenge by holding some clumsy event on the first day or two where we sorted into 5 to 20 different teams, and then got to work on a lot of things in parallel. And then people could switch around between teams as interested or as they might use their skills.

I think it's a fair assumption to say one of those hundred would have the experience to manage the other 99, and allow you to play stakeholder, not project director. That said, hard to imagine getting a lot done in 3 months with a 100 person program.

That’s exactly it. It’s more the 100 day part that is restrictive. It takes a lot of time and effort to get 100 people working effectively.

Here's a book recommendation if you're not sure how to manage these 100 people. You don't have to. Just facilitate them to identify what to work on, then to go and work on it.

Open Space Technology, Harrison Owen

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Space-Technology-Users-Guide/dp/...

A quick but insightful read.

If you're actually interested there are a few companies taking this on such as Athenahealth and DrChrono, both EHRs for small to mid-sized companies. Or if you want to focus on healthcare billing, you should check out Cedar, which focuses on large systems.

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