Brain Murmurs

At Brain Murmurs our approach is to tackle hard problems with small groups. A question that comes up a lot is, why get a small group of extremely skilled consultants when you could have the resources of a large company.

I think the answer comes in the way people are motivated to work. In his essay How to Create Wealth, Paul Graham explains why startups need to be small. Consider this, if an engineer was given the opportunity to work twice as hard for twice the money, many might choose to do so. In large companies, engineers are generally paid a salary that reflects the value of an average engineer. This doesn’t give much incentive to work much harder than the average engineer. What’s the difference between an average engineer and a great one? It’s pretty staggering.

Google’s VP of Engineering described the difference in the Wall Street Journal:

One top-notch engineer is worth “300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.

A small company is one environment where a top engineer has incentive to work at full capacity. Since an engineer’s impact on the rate of success of the company is much easier to measure, it’s much easier to pay them according to the value that they create. The incentive for individual engineers to excel and work effectively is much greater.

Also, small companies enjoy a number of other advantages (from Paul Graham again):

Fortunately there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems. The leading edge of technology moves fast. Technology that’s valuable today could be worthless in a couple years. Small companies are more at home in this world, because they don’t have layers of bureaucracy to slow them down. Also, technical advances tend to come from unorthodox approaches, and small companies are less constrained by
convention.

This is one of the reasons that Brain Murmur’s small entrepreneurial culture has been able to get so much done as contractors.

-Nathan

Filed under: Professional Services by nathan