We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.
The notion of "what is small" is interesting.
I think of small mom and pop shops.
But compared to the "giants" of which there are several
30 is really small.
The US SBA (Small Business Administration) has a table of industries with their definition of small using either dollar amount of receipts or number of employees:
This link is fascinating. I had no idea that the U.S. government definition of small business was so elaborate. I asked ChatGPT, and it turns out there are 978 industries, covered by 102 different size standards! Why did they come up with this? If a company meets their criteria, it can qualify for government contracts, loans, grants, advocacy programs and more.
According to ChatGPT:
To come up with this list, the U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed information on industries, including employment, revenue, and business structure. SBA economists analyze factors like average firm size, capital intensity, and industry concentration to determine reasonable thresholds for “small businesses.” They study the competition between small and large businesses in federal procurement, considering small businesses’ ability to compete for contracts. The annual budget for the SBA is $1 billion. This does not include $50 billion in various loan programs.
I think a company is small whilst all the employees could conceivably fit into a house party. That is perhaps a better metric here in the UK where there are fewer colossal houses. But hopefully you get the idea.
I would say below 50 employees is small, not quite mom&pop but small enough that you know everyone and there aren’t different separate “departments” in the company.
Also what is medium. Currently working with company having couple hundred employees. Doing consulting and own products. Small compared to thousands or tens of thousand of large companies in field. But not anymore small even by EU rules...
CodeWeavers, which I am very lucky to be part of, is also an (almost) 30-year-old small company! We make Wine, Proton, and CrossOver, you might've heard of them. And I think we are hiring as well, please have a look!
I hope to be able to write this blog post in 20 years. My co-founder and I started a bootstrapped company 3 years ago do IaC orchestration and we are slowly but steadily growing. We love being small. We love being accountable to our customers. We love having the freedom to make decisions. Yes, it's not always easy. We explicitly don't want to be a billion dollar company. We want to make a product that serves our niche exactly how they want to be served. We're definitely making less money than if we worked at another company. But we feel we can make it to our goal and think we'll be happy when there.
We are a 15 year old small company with 250 full time employees. I completely bootstrapped the company and never took a dime of debt or any investor money. We do web design and online marketing work. I tried building some products, and though they were game changers internally, they never took off externally. Now Coalition Technologies is services provider with a good reputation for standing behind our work. Though I do hate telling people my email address on the phone... C o a l I t I o n T E c h n o l o g I e s dot com. Why couldn't I have named it Pin or something haha.
Even though we’re now 20 years old, we’ve always been a small company. Over the years, many colleagues have come and gone, and we currently have only 50 employees. Perhaps this is the reality of most startups - while many dream of going public, creating groundbreaking products, or being recognized globally, few achieve it. We can only do our best.
The difference sounds to be in the intents and focus. This sounds like focusing on making product for the people. Others may not. This may not be in the focus for others.
I was interviewing for a position at a startup in the alley of my profession a few years ago where my opening question was when my turn came: where do you see the company in 5 years?
- Sold!
Came the answer without a moment of hesitation. And that was it, the full answer.
Well, they got sold recently, I nod to that. But I did not want to become a salesman, so we wouldn't have get to an agreement even if the position was offered to me.
Getting to be stuck in a long running small organization that has the main purpose of getting big and be sold sounds a terrible life.
Company I work for was sold by the owners mostly because they had huge fights.
We were bought by company that is in similar business but they were not good with tech so we are their „innovation” center instead of them spending years to build innovation from scratch.
We are still separate business unit and continue our thing but they get customers from their network to use our software.
Downside of course being a business unit we have to adjust to some of their stuff and our boss has to explain expenses and deal with all kind of red tape.
It is 3-4 years now since we were bought out and this year company will be 10 years.
But 50 people is big enough that as the business owner, you’d need to be permanently in hire mode, just to replace people moving on for various reasons. And you’d be frequently be exposed to your employee’s personal issues.
I prefer running a _really_ small company - just 5 people.
It is a good feeling reading this. The mentality that is (apparently) so rare today with the many ego pushing disrupters disrupting (obstructing actually, obstructers is the correct term here) life for everyone else. The providing service for others - shortly: creating actual, real value instead of appearances -, is not a typical and mainstream behaviour nowadays, the stability over fame, no, but the pushing spectacular sounding (made up for the purpose of sounding spectacular) elusive agenda on others for heaping up wealth is.
Manipulation instead of serving others is the norm.
Based on what hits the broad audience. Under the radar fair services like this are hidden from the public eye.
My dream was always a very small practice of tightly focused services and a humane work cycle due to low overhead. During crunch time you work hard and during slow times you relax and get paid a lot less.
But every time I had partners or colleagues there is this idea that growth is super important, everyone needs an assistant, and overhead grows to the point that you need $100k every month to make payroll. So everyone has to grind, and you have to take lower margin projects and it's 40 hours a week, except during crunch time where it's, well, a lot more than that.
I helped grow my second company to a profitable 20-person company, but I thought that was too big (and a lot of us worked crazy hours).
I joined and grew another company to around 30 people (I was not the owner so just following orders).
I was never able to find the right people at the right phase of life, with the right skill sets, so I have been a solo practice for a decade. But I always thought a 8-10 person, highly focused consulting practice is where it's at.
Can't think of anything I'd like less than working at a company that has 100 employees after 1 year and then 200 the next year. Talk about mostly being occupied with moving desks, onboarding people and having growth other such growth pains. Not sure why people idealize working in this sort of environment. Other than that it can be lucrative to get in early in a growing business, what's the pull?
Can't think of anything I'd like less than working at a company that has 10,000 employees after 10 years and then 15,000 the next year. Talk about mostly being occupied with moving desks, onboarding people and having growth other such growth pains. Not sure why people idealize working in this sort of environment. Other than that it can offer lucrative salaries in a growing business, what's the pull?
Firms are not run for the benefit of their employees (unless they are also the majority owners, which is pretty rare), so it doesn't actually matter what we prefer unless it impacts hiring (aka the cost of sufficiently useful labor) which it largely doesn't as most employees don't have pricing power on their labor (they are price takers, not price setters) and unions (the purpose of which are to give them that power) are out of the question.
Yeah same thing. Such a company is just 100 different 100 people companies. Plus a lot of big enterprise bs. Working at a 100 ppl company that has 105 people next year, that sounds great. Or even a 1000 people company that has 1000 or 1050 people next year.
I'd guess that outside the Silicon Valley bubble (and few big names in other countries), most software companies are like this. Small, profitable and without a lot of debt.
I worked at one of these. Turned out it was a nepotism grift that flew under the radar. CEO came out of retirement to get an ironclad contract through his college buddy to do basically nothing and get paid for it.
We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.
Congrats. Love to read this.
The notion of "what is small" is interesting. I think of small mom and pop shops. But compared to the "giants" of which there are several 30 is really small.
The US SBA (Small Business Administration) has a table of industries with their definition of small using either dollar amount of receipts or number of employees:
https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/Table%20of%2...
Here are some software related codes/sizes where $ amounts are in millions:
So, according to the SBA you are small until you do $34 million in business annually with no specific number of employees.This link is fascinating. I had no idea that the U.S. government definition of small business was so elaborate. I asked ChatGPT, and it turns out there are 978 industries, covered by 102 different size standards! Why did they come up with this? If a company meets their criteria, it can qualify for government contracts, loans, grants, advocacy programs and more.
According to ChatGPT:
To come up with this list, the U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed information on industries, including employment, revenue, and business structure. SBA economists analyze factors like average firm size, capital intensity, and industry concentration to determine reasonable thresholds for “small businesses.” They study the competition between small and large businesses in federal procurement, considering small businesses’ ability to compete for contracts. The annual budget for the SBA is $1 billion. This does not include $50 billion in various loan programs.
Here's a link to the ChatGPT session: https://chatgpt.com/share/6798e036-7f9c-8008-9190-b704d1cde5...
The U.S. Small Business Administration is a big operation!
I think a company is small whilst all the employees could conceivably fit into a house party. That is perhaps a better metric here in the UK where there are fewer colossal houses. But hopefully you get the idea.
I would say below 50 employees is small, not quite mom&pop but small enough that you know everyone and there aren’t different separate “departments” in the company.
Also what is medium. Currently working with company having couple hundred employees. Doing consulting and own products. Small compared to thousands or tens of thousand of large companies in field. But not anymore small even by EU rules...
For me the line between a small and medium business is if you have HR.
You are doing things the right way; never doubt yourself in that regard: money isn't everything.
On top of that, y’all are great in the community. You’ve hosted my tech meetup before and I know you host others as well.
Thanks for the comment. To think, a Hacker News person was in our offices. How cool!!
Shoot, you hiring Sys Admins?
CodeWeavers, which I am very lucky to be part of, is also an (almost) 30-year-old small company! We make Wine, Proton, and CrossOver, you might've heard of them. And I think we are hiring as well, please have a look!
I hope to be able to write this blog post in 20 years. My co-founder and I started a bootstrapped company 3 years ago do IaC orchestration and we are slowly but steadily growing. We love being small. We love being accountable to our customers. We love having the freedom to make decisions. Yes, it's not always easy. We explicitly don't want to be a billion dollar company. We want to make a product that serves our niche exactly how they want to be served. We're definitely making less money than if we worked at another company. But we feel we can make it to our goal and think we'll be happy when there.
We are a 15 year old small company with 250 full time employees. I completely bootstrapped the company and never took a dime of debt or any investor money. We do web design and online marketing work. I tried building some products, and though they were game changers internally, they never took off externally. Now Coalition Technologies is services provider with a good reputation for standing behind our work. Though I do hate telling people my email address on the phone... C o a l I t I o n T E c h n o l o g I e s dot com. Why couldn't I have named it Pin or something haha.
This is called a successful small business and something to take great pride in outside of the SV bubble.
Even though we’re now 20 years old, we’ve always been a small company. Over the years, many colleagues have come and gone, and we currently have only 50 employees. Perhaps this is the reality of most startups - while many dream of going public, creating groundbreaking products, or being recognized globally, few achieve it. We can only do our best.
The difference sounds to be in the intents and focus. This sounds like focusing on making product for the people. Others may not. This may not be in the focus for others.
I was interviewing for a position at a startup in the alley of my profession a few years ago where my opening question was when my turn came: where do you see the company in 5 years?
- Sold!
Came the answer without a moment of hesitation. And that was it, the full answer.
Well, they got sold recently, I nod to that. But I did not want to become a salesman, so we wouldn't have get to an agreement even if the position was offered to me.
Getting to be stuck in a long running small organization that has the main purpose of getting big and be sold sounds a terrible life.
Being sold is not always bad.
Company I work for was sold by the owners mostly because they had huge fights.
We were bought by company that is in similar business but they were not good with tech so we are their „innovation” center instead of them spending years to build innovation from scratch.
We are still separate business unit and continue our thing but they get customers from their network to use our software.
Downside of course being a business unit we have to adjust to some of their stuff and our boss has to explain expenses and deal with all kind of red tape.
It is 3-4 years now since we were bought out and this year company will be 10 years.
I feel that 50 people is not a small company!
It’s all relative, of course.
But 50 people is big enough that as the business owner, you’d need to be permanently in hire mode, just to replace people moving on for various reasons. And you’d be frequently be exposed to your employee’s personal issues.
I prefer running a _really_ small company - just 5 people.
I praise you.
It is a good feeling reading this. The mentality that is (apparently) so rare today with the many ego pushing disrupters disrupting (obstructing actually, obstructers is the correct term here) life for everyone else. The providing service for others - shortly: creating actual, real value instead of appearances -, is not a typical and mainstream behaviour nowadays, the stability over fame, no, but the pushing spectacular sounding (made up for the purpose of sounding spectacular) elusive agenda on others for heaping up wealth is.
Manipulation instead of serving others is the norm.
Based on what hits the broad audience. Under the radar fair services like this are hidden from the public eye.
My dream was always a very small practice of tightly focused services and a humane work cycle due to low overhead. During crunch time you work hard and during slow times you relax and get paid a lot less.
But every time I had partners or colleagues there is this idea that growth is super important, everyone needs an assistant, and overhead grows to the point that you need $100k every month to make payroll. So everyone has to grind, and you have to take lower margin projects and it's 40 hours a week, except during crunch time where it's, well, a lot more than that.
I helped grow my second company to a profitable 20-person company, but I thought that was too big (and a lot of us worked crazy hours).
I joined and grew another company to around 30 people (I was not the owner so just following orders).
I was never able to find the right people at the right phase of life, with the right skill sets, so I have been a solo practice for a decade. But I always thought a 8-10 person, highly focused consulting practice is where it's at.
Can't think of anything I'd like less than working at a company that has 100 employees after 1 year and then 200 the next year. Talk about mostly being occupied with moving desks, onboarding people and having growth other such growth pains. Not sure why people idealize working in this sort of environment. Other than that it can be lucrative to get in early in a growing business, what's the pull?
Alternatively:
Can't think of anything I'd like less than working at a company that has 10,000 employees after 10 years and then 15,000 the next year. Talk about mostly being occupied with moving desks, onboarding people and having growth other such growth pains. Not sure why people idealize working in this sort of environment. Other than that it can offer lucrative salaries in a growing business, what's the pull?
Firms are not run for the benefit of their employees (unless they are also the majority owners, which is pretty rare), so it doesn't actually matter what we prefer unless it impacts hiring (aka the cost of sufficiently useful labor) which it largely doesn't as most employees don't have pricing power on their labor (they are price takers, not price setters) and unions (the purpose of which are to give them that power) are out of the question.
Yeah same thing. Such a company is just 100 different 100 people companies. Plus a lot of big enterprise bs. Working at a 100 ppl company that has 105 people next year, that sounds great. Or even a 1000 people company that has 1000 or 1050 people next year.
Man, I got that beat by 5+yrs and -49 employees. Most businesses are small businesses. 89% have less than 10 employees.
There's a point at which you can be too serious, simple, low-key, understated, etc.
What is this company, what does it do? There are no links to a main web page, or anything other than these few blog posts.
which company is this? what are their products? anyone got the link?
It’s a company at China, at first we dev software on windows and sale it, today we run am app name knowledge planets, url zsxq.com(in Chinese).
I know one of their company's products, it's https://zsxq.com/. But it came out in 2015, and I've never tried any of their other stuff.
Thanks. We build software and sale it to big companies at first,and then develop anti virus software etc.
We also try some new things such as https://note.slax.com and https://r.slax.com
I'd guess that outside the Silicon Valley bubble (and few big names in other countries), most software companies are like this. Small, profitable and without a lot of debt.
I worked at one of these. Turned out it was a nepotism grift that flew under the radar. CEO came out of retirement to get an ironclad contract through his college buddy to do basically nothing and get paid for it.