It takes a tremendous amount of energy to scale a network—both in playing defense to counteract market saturation and competition, and on the offense, to amplify network effects over time. It’s not just Dropbox with this kind of story—Pinterest, Slack, Zoom, Uber, Airbnb, and others also have thousands (or tens of thousands) of full-time employees, many of them working within the confines of a single app or small family of apps. Ask any of these teams, and they’ll tell you they feel understaffed, and there’s so much more to do. This is what Escape Velocity actually looks like. It heralds a new
...more
