Scaling Startups Without Creating Silos: Hard-Won Lessons

Every successful startup faces the same paradox: the very growth that validates your product can destroy the culture and agility that made you successful in the first place. I’ve seen this firsthand at multiple companies, from Twitter’s explosive growth to eero’s journey through acquisition.

The Inevitable Challenge

As teams grow from 20 to 50 to 200 people, something fundamental changes. The informal communication that worked when everyone sat at the same table breaks down. Teams start developing their own vocabularies, priorities, and even cultures. Before you know it, you have factions instead of a unified company.

Warning Signs I’ve Learned to Watch For

Having lived through several scaling challenges, I’ve become attuned to the early warning signs:

Teams using different terminology for the same concepts
Competing priorities that aren’t resolved at the leadership level
Information hoarding between departments
“Us vs. them” language creeping into conversations
Decreased cross-team collaboration

Strategies That Actually Work

In my First Round Review article, I detail the specific strategies I’ve used to combat this natural drift toward silos:

1. Intentional Cross-Pollination Regularly rotate people between teams, even temporarily. At eero, our hardware engineers would spend time with the mobile team, and vice versa. This builds empathy and shared understanding.

2. Unified Vocabulary and Metrics Establish common language early and protect it fiercely. When different teams use different words for the same concepts, confusion and conflict follow.

3. Transparent Decision-Making Make the decision-making process visible across the organization. When people understand how and why decisions are made, they’re less likely to create conspiracy theories.

4. Cultural Evangelism Assign cultural responsibility to specific people—not just HR, but influential engineers and team leads who can model the behavior you want to see.

The Twitter Experience

At Twitter, I watched this challenge play out on a massive scale. When I joined, the company was already dealing with the tension between rapid feature development and infrastructure stability. The key was creating shared ownership of outcomes rather than just individual team metrics.

We established cross-functional “war rooms” for major initiatives, where product, engineering, and operations worked together with shared success criteria. This broke down the natural barriers between teams.

The Eero Approach

At eero, being a hardware company gave us a different set of challenges. Hardware, firmware, mobile, and cloud teams all had vastly different development cycles and constraints. The risk of silos was even higher.

We solved this by creating shared rituals:

Weekly demos where every team showed their work to everyone
Quarterly planning sessions with all teams in the same room
Cross-team project post-mortems that focused on process, not blame

The Leadership Challenge

As a leader, you have to resist the natural tendency to optimize for short-term efficiency by creating specialized teams that don’t talk to each other. The communication overhead of keeping teams connected is real, but the cost of silos is far higher.

The most important insight I’ve learned: fighting factions isn’t about preventing all disagreement—it’s about ensuring disagreements happen in the open and get resolved constructively rather than festering in isolation.

For detailed strategies and more examples, read my complete analysis at First Round Review.