There’s a myth about how big companies start — that they emerge from large, well-resourced teams with clear plans and proper infrastructure. Almost none of the companies you admire started that way.
They started in small circles. Two or three people who trusted each other enough to be brutally honest, who worked fast enough to test things before overthinking them, and who created a share
d standard for what “good” meant before they had customers or money.
Why Small Circles Outperform Structures
In a tight group, feedback is instant and honest. You can’t hide from the quality of your thinking for long when the person who will tell you it’s wrong is sitting next to you. Decisions happen in conversations rather than in meetings scheduled three days out. The iteration speed is incomparable.
Big teams with clear structures optimize for coordination. Small circles optimize for quality and speed. In the early stage, quality and speed are what matter. Coordination can come later.
San Francisco Creates the Conditions
This is the honest truth about what SF provides: not a guarantee, but a set of conditions where small, aligned teams can move faster than anywhere else. Access to smart people for casual feedback. Density of investors who understand early-stage risk. A cultural default of iteration and shipping over planning and hiding.
The real breakthroughs still come from small groups working in tight proximity. The city makes finding those groups easier and makes the environment more productive once you have them.
Olivier hacker house is specifically designed around this. The house puts aligned, ambitious people in close proximity and then gets out of the way. The small circles form naturally — over breakfast, on evening walks, in the kind of late-night conversations where the real thinking happens. That’s where global ideas start.