What size should a decision-making group be to remain effective?

Steve Jurvetson · Aug 3, 2020

Venture partnership team size should be two to five partners, seven is the absolute limit, and beyond seven partners IRRs and returns will plummet

One of the biggest lessons of his twenty-five years of process learning; team size matters the same way for development teams inside companies and for boards

46:05 20VC: Steve Jurvetson on 20 Years of Friendship with Elon Musk, How To Analyse Market Timing, Why Venture Does Not Scale & Why He Has Never Sold A Share in Any Company He Holds

Jordan Van Horn · Aug 17, 2022

Hiring by large-group consensus is a symptom of not having conviction about the role, and always goes wrong — keep the decision-making group under six

Bringing 15 people into the process to find the best person by consensus substitutes for getting clear on what the organization actually needs

Scope: decision group should be fewer than six people

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Harry Stebbings · Nov 1, 2023 · hedged

Four to six people is the group size where you get optimal decision making

The same dynamic holds in venture partnerships

40:02 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

Wesley Chan · Aug 22, 2022

Whether a board adds value depends on its size: small boards produce substantive discussion while boards of ten to twenty people add little and cost the founder management time

Canva's four-person board has real discussions about hundred-year plans, whereas on large boards everyone has a different opinion and he'd rather not be there

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David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023 · hedged

Product review quality degrades with headcount in the room — fewer than ten, probably more than four, and at twenty it becomes an empty ceremony

More people means wasteful cycles on things like button placement and conflicting opinions; in bigger companies everyone in the management chain feels entitled to attend, which turns the review into ritual

Scope: founders are worth including early despite the risk because of the context they bring

39:13 20Product: Why You Should Not Go Into Product Management, Why the CEO is Always the CPO, How to Build the Best Product Teams & Why You Should Hire People Who Aren't In Product Already with Databricks SVP Product, David Meyer

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

Adding people to a room dilutes the clarity and intensity of what gets said and makes communication actively damaging rather than merely slower

You self-censor — dropping glibness and curse words — and polite phrasing takes ten seconds where blunt phrasing takes four; with ten people, listeners interpret things differently and then report the news wrong to others, whereas people who work together share a lexicon and can be high bandwidth

40:21 Additional people dilute directness and cause self censorship