From experience, a 10 person team will keep some employees happy, sure, but the best probably not. Their pay will be too low, and even if not, most good employees eventually want to do more - manage people, work on new technologies, work on bigger scale, etc.
Of course, nowadays I think the average retention at tech companies is like 2 years isn't it? So this is an industry-wide problem. The bigger problem if you're founding a 10 person company is that, assuming you don't want to run this for the rest of your life, you'll eventually want people to replace you, and they will also want bigger challenges, etc.
I once saw a great talk at MicroConf, by the guy who started Balsamiq, which he started with the purpose of being a 1-person company. He soon found he had to grow. The bottom line of his talk is that most companies have a "natural" range of sizes they can be, and you can choose where you want to be in the range, but it's gotta be in there. Very good and interesting talk.
Of course, nowadays I think the average retention at tech companies is like 2 years isn't it? So this is an industry-wide problem. The bigger problem if you're founding a 10 person company is that, assuming you don't want to run this for the rest of your life, you'll eventually want people to replace you, and they will also want bigger challenges, etc.
I once saw a great talk at MicroConf, by the guy who started Balsamiq, which he started with the purpose of being a 1-person company. He soon found he had to grow. The bottom line of his talk is that most companies have a "natural" range of sizes they can be, and you can choose where you want to be in the range, but it's gotta be in there. Very good and interesting talk.
(Hi back! Didn't know you HN'ed)