Charlie Songhurst

the wisest prospector with the best maps and the most intelligent strategy sometimes just won't find it, and someone will just fall asleep, put the pan in a stream, and gold will come out.

There really is a real nexus of serendipity at this stage.

Then when you move to Series A, it's really all about labor productivity, but in a different form.

It's, can the manager

And one of the fallacies is most early stage startup founders think they're managers and they're actually not.

What they have is a team that's actually managing them.

Because when you're managing, say, 10 or less people and you're spending time with them every day, what's actually happening is they're managing you by influence because they know you well enough and they talk to you enough to work out what your desires are.

So as long as you're articulate and energetic and sort of engaged, you actually don't have to manage.

The team manages you up.

But when you scale to 30 people, to 90 people or above, you no longer have those personal connections.

You have to move to formal management techniques.

And that's like a sort of Fermi paradox great filter.

It wipes out an amazing amount of startups.

And the way that's devinced is a collapse in the labor productivity per person.

There's a term in microeconomics called managerial diseconomies of scale.

And I think in some ways, the angle of the decline of productivity per person is the difference between the sort of the stripes, the great startups and the failures.

And maybe if you're a great startup, as you go from 10 people to 100 people, output per person drops 15%.

And if you're a bad startup, it actually drops over 90%, with the result that often 100 people startups produce less than they did when they had 10 people, because the managerial collapse has been so extreme.

And one interesting thing is if you look at the companies that get very big, maybe there's a sort of interesting explanation where...

One of the shared attributes was an instinct for the sort of structures and processes of management that were shared between Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Carlitons, all these sort of super talented people.