Today Peter and I had the chance to spend time with both leadership and various other teams from Zappos and MailChimp (if you are interested in using something like Mailchimp then you can check out the pricing here). Both companies covered a variety of topics and simply being in the room and listening was fascinating. My brain was overloaded with mental notes and there will be more posts to come, but one theme stuck out to me in particular: scale makes things hard no matter the size of your company.
At The Iron Yard we’re approaching 40 full time employees. MailChimp is approaching 300 and Zappos just tipped over 1500. We’re three very different companies at varying levels of maturity and size, but the problem of maintaining quality, innovation and culture in the midst of growth was common to all of us.
Seeing further down road of growth and hearing about the problems being solved was a good reminder that it can often seem from the outside that companies have ‘made it,’ but in reality great businesses are the same in that smart people are solving hard problems well—and the problems exist for everyone.
