fal keeps management flat with hands-on team leads

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 27:49

   what are your views on scaling up or keeping flat um so culture wise like our company i would say is like flatter than your run of the mill startup I think like the deepest level we have is like two levels of like reporting and yeah I think that's that's by design I would say we we we really believe in this like super ICs I think it's becoming more popular now it has a name. I don't think we had a name. Really? Yeah. It's a super IC? Super IC. So we have forward deployed deployed agent, not agents. Is it agents? No, any agents soon. I mean, I should know this. I know Palantir quite well. So we have forward deployed engineers and now we have super ICs. Super ICs are, I think like now it's becoming a more common term. Basically, you want your like management layer to be super ICs. So people who are just like so epic at their job, they can like actually

2. 28:47

   do hands-on work and then they can also like lead teams uh i think we have a very similar without like calling it this way we we always have the structure um in a way that that like essentially like we don't have pure managers we don't plan on having pure managers yeah and we can gather the team around like these really magnetic like people within the team that are just like really freaking good. And that's just like a very, I don't know, natural way of like building leadership within the team. So that's kind of how we've been building it out. Like we just add really good people and then we see leaders emerge and we gather like the teams around them. But how long can you go this way? I think there's a limit, right? So you start hitting, I think like some communication bottlenecks right and I think that's part of the scaling

3. 29:42

   challenge right like you have to kind of think about like like we think a lot about like how do you how do we communicate with the team broadly how do we keep everyone like aligned I think those are like you know as as you grow those start becoming the challenges and so far like we just try to have like many check-ins with the team I think we're still keeping everything flat and and see like when things break and then we would throw like maybe more management layers but but essentially like we're really focused on this like super IC strategy. And in a way our growth was timed perfectly with how coding agents and NLMs became a huge part of software engineering and I think forever we can keep this as long as agents and coding coding models improve at this pace you just need really talented leaders that super ICs to manage maybe be the

4. 30:40

   leader of I don't know five to ten engineers and you rely on coding agents to do most of the work and I think we can keep up like this to to have like maybe just two levels of hierarchy and that's it I mean look Applovin does multi-billion dollars in revenue they have like 400 employees and 100 people on their engineering team. Yeah. Yeah. Big fan of Adam. Big fan. Big fan. I mean, I was there