“Will it Scale?”

There was this one time one of the poor souls who had to work for me asked about scale. Hooboy did he get an earful. “Scale” is one of those buzzwords the cognoscenti out here in Silicon Valley are prone to throw out in conversation when they want to make a point about the viability of a plan, or product. The name drop usually occurs at the end of some pitch, and it will go something like this: “Yes, but…” (and the universe collectively inhales), “…Will It Scale™?”

The “will it scale,” question is a proxy for the prospects of a company’s growth. Not just any growth, though, big growth, huge growth. The term of art is a “hockey stick” increase—meant to mimic the curve of a hockey stick’s blade when turned on its side. If you’re starting a technology business making a point about scale is always on a series of powerpoint slides (also known as the “pitch deck”) where, inevitably, every graph has a lovely curve up and to the right. Un-ironically, the scale of the axes on those graphs matters less than the exciting visual of steeply ascending growth curves positioned well inside the investment return horizon of the potential investor. The discussion of scale matters a lot in a pitch: the scale of the market, your competitors, and of course, your ability to scale. However, here’s the question today (and the reason I directed so much ire at one of my co-workers when he asked about it): when did the word “scale” become synonymous with the word “large”?

The answer is our obsessive focus on measures of growth at the expense of almost everything else. Drastic increases in monthly active users, click-throughs, views, “stickiness,” licenses, revenues—anything that shows hockey-stick increases is the singular way to show success. Growth is the way to get funded. If you’re a public company any measure of growth is practically the only way to keep your investors happy. “Getting to scale” has come to mean rapid growth and that means success. Get big quickly is now the business mantra of our age and importantly, the fixation is altering our experience of ourselves. As a direct result of this, measures of apparent size are now a cultural obsession. How many followers do you have on Instagram is considered far more important than the quality of the pictures you’re showing. The sheer quantity of “shares” in a news article matters more than the veracity of the content. “Going viral” doesn’t mean getting sick anymore, it’s a measure of operational health. There are products that many of us are using right now that are specifically designed to provide the endorphin rush of pleasure when “followers” like something we have done online. The system we have built that rewards growth as the measure of success has created products and services designed to deliver on that metric; not because the products are good, but because designers have become adept at holding attention for the sake of a metric. We have become unhealthily obsessed with growth and size; ruled by a measurement. Such is our preoccupation with expansion and proliferation that scale has become more a definition of business success than good old customer satisfaction. The fact that that growth at any expense is rewarded proves we have learned to game the system.

The adage “what gets measured gets done” applies. The reality distorting focus on measuring growth has in-turn created a slew of technologies meant to deliver on that measurement. You and I and our fingers and our eyeballs are the measures. Growth comes despite the effect it has on us, its users—and certainly in spite of the workers that have to mass-produce the products. Obsessions over a single metric make for costly business decisions; we won’t be the first generation to figure that out. It wasn’t that long ago that banking’s obsession with never-ending returns led them to collateralize debt obligations (and look at how that worked out). Every age seems to have its Enron. The dire warning this time is that we have put the attention of our children on the line for the sake of “scale”. We’re telling our kids that growth and “likes” are measured in clicks and that these metrics matter more than internal development and self-satisfaction. We are teaching that character matters only insofar as described by follower counts. Perhaps it is time to realize that companies using attention-keeping technologies for growth are just another Ponzi scheme.

Let us reconsider what the metrics of success genuinely are. Consider this: small is good too. Very small can be even better. Scaled down and personal can be deeply satisfying. The scale of each of our impacts on society is best measured in the life we have changed, even if that life is just our own. Growth happens to each of us one day at a time, just as it always has, just as it always will.