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The team shrinks
Bending Spoons is a Milan company that buys digital businesses and moves them onto one shared operating system. After the Evernote acquisition was completed, the team shrank from roughly 350 to about 60 within 12 to 18 months, and it has since dropped to 20.
What 20 people shipped
Those 20 people launched the biggest update to the product in January and February of this year. A couple of years of cleaning up the code base and improving the cloud infrastructure had made the product easier to maintain and easier to expand with new features. On top of that came a lot of powerful AI automations.
Why smaller pays off
Cutting costs is a smaller payoff than the capacity it frees. With teams this small, the same capital can be spread across smaller purchases, which widens the set of companies worth buying and pushes back the point where returns start to fall because there is too little left to acquire.
Why do smaller teams ship faster?
Fred Brooks argued in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that adding people to a late software project makes it later. Every added person creates new communication links, and the number of possible pairs grows as n times n minus one, divided by two. A team of 350 has 61,075 possible pairs, while a team of 20 has 190. Each pair is a place where a decision can wait or a detail can get lost. Brooks drew the lesson from managing IBM's OS/360 project.
How does cleaning up code speed future work?
Each shortcut in a code base works like a loan: it saves time now, and the interest comes due as extra effort every time someone changes nearby code. Cleaning up the code, known as refactoring, pays that debt down so new features take fewer changes. Consolidating cloud infrastructure removes duplicate systems that engineers would otherwise maintain by hand. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, introduced the debt metaphor in 1992.
Why do lean teams free up money for more deals?
Payroll is usually the largest recurring cost in a software company, so every role removed leaves more of each year's earnings available to redeploy. Berkshire Hathaway has long been known for overseeing dozens of subsidiaries from a headquarters staff of only a few dozen people. Its subsidiaries run their own operations, which keeps overhead at the top low. Warren Buffett's shareholder letters have described that small headquarters as a deliberate choice.
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