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ex machina

with impeccable timing dave links to the 'growth' article mentioned in the previous post and adds a link to this response to the article from a 'netscapee' :

> I was delighted to read this article by Joel Brodsky
> (http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$113). It had some
> great stuff about what kind of business you want to be in.
>
> It definitely captured a lot of things that have been true of O'Reilly.

It also captured a lot of things that were true of Netscape as well (which was definitely a company on the Amazon.com model):
"When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. ...Netscape is the most egregious example of this, growing from 5 to about 2000 programmers in one year. As a result, their culture was a mishmash of different people with different values about the company, all tugging in different directions."
"I'm a firm believer in the importance of corporate culture as promoted in books like "Built to Last" (which is why I was one of the instigators of the values stuff at Netscape), so it's interesting to speculate how this dynamic would play out in the current era. At first glance it seems as if no one has any time anymore to wait around for a business to grow organically, so it's difficult to see how any "dot-com" today could in fact build a coherent and enduring culture."

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5/16/2000 09:57:00 PM 0 comments

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