I find the following a really interesting way of looking at scale of companies. Anecdotally larger companies I've worked at work slower than smaller companies, and this is a large factor in it.
Coordination cost grows faster than headcount.
This is why “just throw more people at the problem” often fails, and why adding heads late in a project can make it later. Every new person adds communication overhead with everyone they need to coordinate with. The graph gets denser, not just larger.
I’ve seen managers genuinely puzzled when a team doubled in size but output barely changed. The answer is always the same: the new edges ate the new capacity. More people meant more alignment meetings, more context-sharing, more waiting for decisions that now required more stakeholders.
The solution isn’t to stop hiring. It’s to be intentional about reducing edges. Clear ownership. Autonomous teams with minimal dependencies. Interfaces that let people work in parallel instead of in lockstep. The best organizations aren’t the ones with the most people - they’re the ones with the most leverage per person.