> I feel that failure or regression to the mean are quite likely
i suspect that these failures are a failure for humans to adapt to a larger herd than the traditional tribal size - anything beyond a couple hundred people max.
Have you ever read the book "Loonshots"
There's an entire chapter about how primitive human societies probably maxed out at about 150 individuals. Companies that exceed this headcount basically need to change themselves into highly hierarchical organizations, and many companies die in this transition.
I went through this stage with a smaller company and there's definitely this point where you no longer know everyone and things change. Creo however did manage to scale this well beyond 150 people. You don't necessarily need a lot of hierarchy but you do need to figure out a structure. Creo always had a hierarchy, it wasn't like Valve or something. It's just how things worked within that hierarchy.
I experienced this as two phases of growth in the path from ~100 people to ~15000 people: the first phase where you don’t know everyone and the second one where you don’t even know every department/major project.
150 is Dunbar's number, made by extrapolating a monkey species tribe size / brain size correlation to human brain size. Something interesting to think about, but not exactly hard science.
The book Loonshots says as much. Extrapolating from monkey brain sizes to human social interactions is a bit reminiscent of phrenology IMO, but it is an interesting observation. Anecdotally, I've found it to hold true, particularly in startup land when companies transition into blitzscaling hypergrowth.
At Meta, we collected tons of real world data to pretty definitively prove this is true. Humans can only really relate to about that many others a time. And most people have about 5 others that they are actually close with.
The observation that there is a (very) strong statistical correlation between cranium and social size is an interesting and correct observation.
That much is true and uncontroversial.
What the article takes issue with is the exact number of 150, which can vary from person to person. But really, the criticism entirely misses the point. The number is just a rule of thumb derived from extrapolation. It's not a hard and fast rule like "You can only have 150 friends". Obviously.
Perhaps it should be something like cranial volume / body volume, or else we'd expect whales and dolphins to have massive tribe sizes, yet they typically hang with something like 20 peers.
i suspect that these failures are a failure for humans to adapt to a larger herd than the traditional tribal size - anything beyond a couple hundred people max.