Now, if it wasn't for all that, there's still the problem that, from personal experience, most employees don't invest as much energy as a founder would - which is perfectly understandable. As the founder to employee ratio gets smaller, you find yourself hiring three people to do a job you could do yourself, just to make sure it gets done reliably and timely. In a smaller startup, early hires are more similar to founders because they're close to them and stand to gain a lot if the company succeeds and grows. For employee #213, they sell 40 hours of work per week and their fixed salary is all they really stand to get out of it.
So while I like the romantic idea of having a large company comprised of multiple independent startups, I haven't seen that work and I can barely picture it work :( One can get somewhat close to this with the right organisational structure (e.g. sacrificing efficiencies of scale for team autonomy where feasible), but it's not even close to the same thing.
I think the best way to scale is to build processes that reinforce the traits you want in a team, and hire managers who understand teams are collections of unique individuals, as is the manager. The manager should be free to manage their people in a way that optimizes delivery and reduces churn. Between teams there should be a very high bar for quality of communication and delivery. The culture of the organization should be built around respect for each person hired and a relentless focus on ensuring individuals end up in teams that they are effective in and are therefore maximally effective as teams.
The startup that does that should absolutely be called "Boys from Brazil".
The fruits of labor grow ever higher. By which I mean: In the early days of a startup the problem space is ripe and plentiful, the impact you can have is outsized, and the pool of people with which to share it is the smallest it will ever be.
As a company grows, all three of these factors are subject to strain. The problem space becomes sparser, outsized impacts are recognised further up the ever-growing hierarchy, and the pool of people with which you're sharing your impact becomes larger and recognition becomes shorter lived and more diffuse.
Rands has a great article on that topic well worth reading: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/stables-and-volatiles/
It matches my experience with startups experiencing challenges as they grow.
It also eventually became a monolithic org.
Same with Valve and flat org structures.
Once something scales enough it becomes the blob, like everything else.
In lots of other (worse) companies they had huge teams delivering a lot less.
Idk why people don’t like the question, I’m actually looking for a developed model/ paradigm around this concept. No sense reinventing the wheel.