Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Small size buys space to think
Small ventures change things
New technology tends to come from new ventures, from the founding fathers in politics to Fairchild Semiconductor's Traitorous Eight in business. Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.
What a startup is
A startup works on the principle that you need other people to get stuff done and need to stay small enough that you can. Defined positively, it is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. Its job is to question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
Defining technology
Technology is any new and better way of doing things, with no reason to limit it to computers. It lets people do more with less, ratcheting up fundamental capabilities to a higher level.
How did the Traitorous Eight start Fairchild?
In 1957 eight young engineers, including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in California. Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument put up 1.5 million dollars and formed Fairchild Semiconductor around them. The company developed the first practical integrated circuit in 1959. Noyce and Moore went on to found Intel in 1968.
Why do small teams think differently?
In a 2019 paper in Nature, sociologist James Evans and colleagues analyzed 65 million papers, patents, and software projects. They found that small teams were more likely to disrupt existing ideas, while large teams tended to develop them further. Large teams cited older, more established work, while small teams were more likely to draw on recent and unusual sources.
Why does adding people slow some projects?
Fred Brooks laid out the problem in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month, which drew on his time managing IBM's System/360 software. Each added person needs to be brought up to speed and increases the number of communication links in the team. A team of 10 has 45 pairwise links, and a team of 20 has 190. Brooks summed it up with what became known as Brooks's law, that adding people to a late software project makes it later.