A New Kind of Startup Is Coming

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There’s a famous theory in engineering called Conway’s Law, which explains a lot about why different eras of technology produce different kinds of organizations. The original formulation is:

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

For example, if your organization consists of three tight-knit teams that are spread across three geographical locations, your software will probably consist of three main modules with lots of internal complexity and simple, well-defined interfaces between them.

Here’s a graphic from an excellent explainer of Conway’s Law that illustrates the idea: