Why Do Big Internet Companies Fall Asleep at Scale?

Jim Lanzone says the usual failure at scale is falling asleep at the wheel. People who succeeded by climbing the ladder become conservative, and if the leaders are not product-driven they lose sight of what matters. The damage is often invisible from outside: the chance not taken, the company not bought, or the deal a different team would not have signed. You never see the list of what was on the table. What you see later is a startup beating them with something they did not ship.

His rule is the old line that only the paranoid survive. A product company in this business has to run hard for its users, in his phrase a hundred miles an hour, seven days a week. He is always worried about startups. The misses, not the visible decisions, are what catch a scaled company.