I will trust the person with dirt under their fingernails that came from building something, long before I'll trust someone in a nice tailored suit (resembling the guy in the Snowden article) who talks corp-speak.
The first wave of people you hire are very strong in certain areas (eg: pain tolerance, imagination), and very weak in others (organization, social skills). It turns out that in the first year, the pain tolerance is a lot more important than organizational skills, and that first wave of people didn't care about certain things, like an employee handbook, performance reviews, etc - all they wanted to do is get shit done. Eventually, things flip, and suddenly we find ourselves spending an entire week doing 360 reviews and similar work. The new people who join the company notice that the 360 reviews are not sufficiently streamlined, and they bring this to the attention of the newly hired chief people officer. That person takes a look at the problem and fixes it. At that point, the story should be delivered as follows: "the company decided that it was the right time to invest in this process, and this is how we did it." That sounds a lot different than "it was a mess and I fixed it."
What works for small projects may not work for large ones.
Equally the overhead of managing a large project will kill most ones if done from the start.