When the Size Changes, so Should the Strategy

Or, you can successfully reanimate a hamster, but not a human being

Jun 20, 2021

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

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Today, let’s talk about scale. More precisely, what we don’t intuitively understand about scale. For that, let me start with a story: the reanimation of rats and hamsters in laboratories.

In the 1950s, the National Institute for Medical Research in London invested extensively in cryobiology — the study of the effects of freezing on bodies and tissues. Scientists regularly froze rats and hamsters beyond the point of death in labs.

At this point, the animal is frozen solid — like a piece of wood — and will not recover on its own. It’s dead, but not kind of. The scientific term for this state is “suspended animation”. There is no heart rate, no breathing, the core temperature is around 1 degree Celsius, and somewhere between 10 and 50% of the animal’s body water is frozen to ice.

Scientists then used diathermic reheating — producing heat via high frequency electric currents — to warm the animal. They put a frozen solid hamster in a makeshift microwave oven with artificial respiration and turned it on. After a few seconds, the hamster woke up and started wandering around.

Almost every rodent they froze was successfully reanimated — healthy, behaving as usual, back from being frozen to death, sometimes multiple times. This success (even though brutal to rodents) showed immense promise in preserving tissues and blood for a long time (which otherwise had to be thrown away after a couple of weeks) back in the 50s.

This success is the reason why science fiction and comic book stories have people being frozen in time (Captain America) or astronauts being sent off in cryosleep (2001: A Space Odyssey) to other planets. For a little while, it looked like that might actually be possible.

Because, if freezing and diathermic reheating worked on hamsters… it might work on rabbits. If it worked on rabbits, then maybe it’d work on primates. And if it worked on primates… then maybe it’d work on humans. But alas… it doesn’t scale up!

We can’t simply 10x the size of a hamster and expect the same result — the mechanics don’t work like that. In other words, we cannot freeze and unfreeze humans. A human is too big for the anti-freeze agent to diffuse into the cells. A hamster, on the other hand, is an acceptable size.

This, of course, also applies to businesses.

The rules that work in a 10-people company don’t work in a 500-people company. A small company can be unstructured and still function (in fact, being unstructured can make it function even better), but the culture dynamics are entirely unique in a big company. The individual connections in the network are just too complex for simplistic rules to apply. Without proper structure, it would delve into chaos.

Every strategy, rule, and principle has an acceptable size where things work well, but break when we try to scale them into a different size or speed. There are no human-sized hamsters for a reason.

Basecamp is a tremendously successful business, but it has a convenient size (a small business with less than 50 people) where its strategy and positioning function so well. In their book, Rework, Jason Fried and DHH write: “If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti- is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.”

There’s a reason why they have such a huge fan-following. Even when one-third of the company’s employees quit due to a recent policy change, Fried’s and DHH’s Twitter followers only grew in numbers. Their constant attack on Apple’s app store fees generates a lot of buzz for their email service called Hey.

But if they were to grow, do a bunch of hires and acquisitions, and believe this same “beef as marketing” strategy would make them successful even with 500 people, it would lead to all kinds of disappointment.

A certain kind of mindset is required to be an Angel Investor, which is very different from a partner at a16z. Similarly, running a startup, a small business, and a public company requires very different strategies. A startup may benefit from speed and virality, à la Clubhouse; an anti-Silicon Valley and pro-bootstrapping positioning may help small businesses such as Todoist and Basecamp; whereas stability and slowness themselves can become leverage for a big company such as LinkedIn and Microsoft.

There’s a reason why Zuck changed Facebook’s guiding principle from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast with stable infra” in 2014, soon after they went public.

Every strategy, rule, and principle has an acceptable size. Respect it. When the size changes, so should the strategy, rule, and principle. All things don’t scale.

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Interesting Finds

In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, should business owners resolve to stick to business? A pseudonymous group inspired by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong came together under the banner “Mission Protocol,” with the aim of getting other companies to start “putting aside activities and conversations” outside the scope of their professional missions. (Peter Savodnik / Quillette)

For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and access to goods. How did inequality ratchet up? Egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is). Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. (Kim Sterelny / Aeon)

There are psychological benefits of commuting to work. The smell of the café car, the gathering of the shoulder bag, the clack of shoes on the lobby floor—all the sensory cues saying You’re a professional journalist arriving in office for work would be gone. (Jerry Useem / The Atlantic)

Why it’s so satisfying to root for villains. Villains have a part to play beyond reflecting societal fears and serving as an outlet for our deep-seated temptations: embracing them allows us to find ourselves in narratives where many of us continue to be shunted to the side or rendered invisible. (Aja Romano / Vox)

How a chaotic project became a beloved hit. Shrek, known for its examination of true love, self-acceptance, identity and friendship, all while resisting the typical damsel-in-distress theme, has influenced a generation. It’s the most anti-Disney movie ever. (Gina Cherelus / New York Times)

Why some buildings delight us and others disappoint. Architects tend to emphasise overall aggregate form. And then, very often, it’s value-engineered out. That’s what’s creating a lot of the impoverishment in the environment. To have “sticky” places — places that engage you, your sensory system, your motor system, and help you create a sense of identification with them — you have to have all those things, and most buildings don’t. (Amanda Kolson Hurley / Bloomberg)

French economist Gabriel Zucman scours spreadsheets to find secret offshore accounts. The top wealth detective’s methods are unusually brute-force compared with those of recent-vintage U.S. economists, relying not on powerful computers, regression analyses, or predictive models, but on simple, voluminous spreadsheets compiling the tax tables, macroeconomic datasets, and cross-border-flow calculations of central banks. (Ben Steverman / Bloomberg)

My Directive

“Learning by Doing” is essential in areas where you want to innovate, push boundaries, and test your hypothesis from first principles.

In other places, it is unnecessary and expensive — both in terms of time and resources.

Quote to Note

Lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires what, for lack of a better term, we can call an act of will.

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

Talk to Me

Do you agree with what I said, or do you think otherwise? Send me counters, comments, questions, and tips on becoming like Captain America. 🤜🤛

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋

P.S. I also write Expander, a weekly guide on doing product, measuring what matters, working with people, and growing a business. Delivered every Tuesday at 6AM IST.