Tobi Lütke

Like if you have all the skills to do something, then you don't need to coordinate with anyone.

Books tend to be so good because they're written by one person.

but usually with an editor.

So now you have one person holding the pen and being able to construct an incredible fantasy world with all these characters and perfectly everything written in the same tone of voice.

The characters act

consistent to previous chapters and so on and so on.

If you would give every chapter to another team member and write a book, there would be no cohesion between these kind of things.

So, like, especially if you don't actually, if you try to do it all at the same time,

because then no one can coordinate, no one knows if, you know, who Bob really is.

Bob shows up in one chapter different from a chapter, other chapter.

A lot of companies unfortunately run like this and just try to like write a book by accelerating it in such a way that they parcel out the tasks and give them to a bunch of people and then you end up with kind of a mess.

So,

at a certain size when a task is bigger than a book you can't do it at one person anymore now you do need a team so but you should understand like every single time like if you do this you are still trying to create something that feels to the people who are gaining like one other side like the product needs to feel like was written by a single author even though you had in our case like three and a half thousand engineers building the thing

So that requires an enormous communication challenge, which isn't to be underestimated.

The second best size of a team is five with an ability to flex up to eight for a short period of time.

But it's

It needs to be temporary.

That's what we found.

It seems like the military came pretty much to a similar conclusion, right?

Like in sport sizes.