Dunbar's number makes little sense for directly determining/classifying organizational sizes. Most of peoples' relationships lie outside of the organization they work for. You'd probably have little to no relationship with people in your organization way before you reach Dunbar's number.
Well, it may be 50, it may be 150, but the point is, it's probably fine to call a company of 10 a startup, and it's absurd to call a Google or Facebook a startup.
Which leaves open the question of what to call Dropbox. Well funded, profitable, late-stage startup? Sounds like too much of a mouthful.
I see your point, but there's more numbers when it comes to companies, there's a break at 7 or 8, and another one somewhere around 20. I might have fudged the numbers a littlebit, but they're both breaking points when a company needs to change its organisational structure: Starting with a flat, informal startup, at 7 or 8 is where people may feel their voice is not informally heard at (for instance) meetings, that needs to be addressed by a (slightly) more formal type of meeting. Somewhere around 20 there's a second break which is when you need to start thinking about an extra level of management (just one at first, of course). There's probably a few more that I don't know of and I would not be at all surprised if Dunbar's number is one of them.
"In my opinion it is at 5 that the feeling of "team" really starts. At 5 to 8 people, you can have a meeting where everyone can speak out about what the entire group is doing, and everyone feels highly empowered. However, at 9 to 12 people this begins to break down -- not enough "attention" is given to everyone and meetings risk becoming either too noisy, too boring, too long, or some combination thereof. Although I've been unable to find the source, I've heard of some references to a study from the 1950s that says that the optimum size for a committee is 7. Likewise, it's fairly easy for us to see and agree that a dinner party starts to break down somewhere above 7 or 8 people, as do also tabletop games of both the strategic (I prefer 5) and role-playing varieties (I prefer 7). These size limits can be overcome, but require increased amounts of "grooming".
"The chasm that starts somewhere between 9 to 12 people can be especially daunting for a small business. As you grow past 12 or so employees, you must start specializing and having departments and direct reports; however, you are not quite large enough for this to be efficient, and thus much employee time that you put toward management tasks is wasted. Only as you approach and pass 25 people does having simple departments and managers begin to work again, as it starts to really make sense for department heads to spend significant time just communicating and coordinating (and as individual departments become large enough to once again allow for the dynamic exchange of ideas that had previously occurred in the original 5-9 member seed group).
"I've already noted the next chasm when you go beyond 80 people, which I think is the point that Dunbar's Number actually marks for a non-survival oriented group. Even at this lower point, the noise level created by required socialization becomes an issue, and filtering becomes essential. As you approach 150 this begins to be unmanageable. Once a company grows past 200 you are really starting to need middle-management, but often you can't afford it yet. Only when you get up past that, maybe at 350-500 people, does middle-management start really working, primarily because you've once again segmented your original departments, possibly again reducing them to Dunbar-sized groups."
That eliminates capital-intensive businesses. I think most people would consider Tesla and SpaceX to be startups, but Tesla has 3500 employees and SpaceX has >2000.
I honestly don't know why you'd need 250 people to run a service like Dropbox. Dropbox is a piece of software that could recreated in about a month by a smart hacker; and if you're using AWS, you don't have worry about the servers (so don't need a sysadmin/maintenance staff) -- so, theoretically could be comfortably run by a handful of skilled core engineers.
Why are 250 people working at Dropbox? Is Dropbox overstaffed?
> Dropbox is a piece of software that could recreated in about a month by a smart hacker;
A service running on AWS with intra-account deduplication, with signup, referrals, billing and support, Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Blackberry, Android, kindle and web clients, all internationalised into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish (both European and Latin American), and an API with six platform-specific SDKs for Dropbox integration.
Dropbox is also somewhat of an enterprise sales play now. I am sure they have a decent sized sales team to get more companies onboard with teams accounts.
It's a genuine question. To my mind, a startup has a small number of employees and not very much money. This is hardly the first time I've heard of a company with >100 employees described as a startup, so I'm interested to know what people's definitions are.
>A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
I once interviewed with a company that maintained a staff of <25 people throughout its entire 8 year existence. It struck me as odd when they described themselves as a startup.
According to Paul Graham, "a startup is a company designed to grow fast."
By this definition, they didn't fit the bill. Dropbox might, depending on whether or not they're still in a rapid growth phase.
Well, it can get confusing when "a company designed to grow fast" doesn't, and yet still has enough revenue coming in to not die. I worked at a company that considered themselves a startup when I first interned there in 2004 (they'd been founded around 2002 and had just gotten their first 7-figure contract). When I left in 2007, it was apparent they were really a small business, they started calling themselves a small business around 2009, and they finally went out of business in 2011. I think headcount topped out at around a dozen in 2006 - it'd been around 7 at my first internship, and I think it was down to just founders when they went under.
It seems like you're taking the term "fast" to refer to the number of employees. I think it refers more to revenue, or maybe user acquisition for those "we'll figure out how to make money later" companies.
