Silos are the price of growth

Silos are the price a startup pays for adding enough people to scale output beyond what a tight founding team can personally coordinate. In the early phase, one person can hold product, go to market, and hiring context in their head, read every internal doc, and connect problems across teams. As headcount climbs, teams split into narrower jobs, handoffs multiply, and coordination work starts to consume real operating capacity.

• At Airtable, the shift was visible in daily work. The company moved from 15 people, where every doc was readable and every new hire got a personal coffee walk, to 750 to 800 people, where dozens could join in a week and cross company context was no longer humanly possible.
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• The practical result is more managers, more planning layers, and more meetings whose job is simply to line up other meetings. That is not just cultural drift. It is the operating system a larger company uses when decisions can no longer travel through a few highly connected people.
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• The upside is leverage. Smaller two pizza teams can stop doing everything themselves and instead specialize, ship more in parallel, and turn ideas into shipped work faster. The downside is more breakage at the seams when teams stop talking enough. Coinbase's experience showed that hiring too fast can make onboarding itself eat more than half of team capacity.
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The companies that navigate this best keep adding structure without losing local ownership. The next phase of startup management is building teams small enough to move fast, while adding just enough process to keep information and decisions flowing across the seams instead of hardening into separate kingdoms.