I strongly believe the "sweet zone" for headcount is somewhere around 200-500 employees. You can still make a difference, but at the same time you're not struggling with the day to day nuances of a 5-50 person startup. To sum it up:
You will get paid next week, you're no more than 2-3 levels removed from the CEO, and the fiefdoms don't have the coffers to squabble.
Funny, I've heard of that before, but the correlation didn't strike me until I reread it. I remember it from when it was mentioned in the book "The Tipping Point".
That article mentions that Dunbar proposed 150, but the real count is probably closer to double that.
I think for a company, 150 is probably perfect. If the real number of relationships one person can maintain is 300, that grants an allowance of 50% of their maintainable relationships for both work and play.
That 150 number made me remember this nice, little compact, too nice story about Gore-Tex which was probably in 'The Tipping Point' (I don't remember):
"What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago"
I remember reading about a tech company 20 years or so ago (cant remember the name or industry) that attributed their success to splitting divisions in two when the head count exceeded 600. 600 was the maximum size where everyone knew everybody's name.
My experience is that 100 is a very good size to join. It's small enough that an individual can have an impact, that everyone knows who you are, that stock options mean something, and that you get paid every month.
I think you are talking about BSO-Origin. I worked there for 4 years, and they called divisions "cells" for that reason. I think it worked wonderfully for IT services, and I wonder why other companies didn't adopt that model as well.
BSO-Origin also had something called "Environmental Accounting", where the environmental impact of each project was estimated, and a certain amount was re-invested in environmental projects.
The founder (Eckart Wintzen) was a true visionnaire, and unfortunately he passed away recently. Here is a great article about him, back from the 90s:
You will get paid next week, you're no more than 2-3 levels removed from the CEO, and the fiefdoms don't have the coffers to squabble.