There are many nuggets of wisdom that we use as guiding principles when building our team. Here are five that have proven to be especially valuable and lasting.

The rule of 3 and 10

Coined by Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of Rakuten, the rule implies that every time your team triples in size, rounding up t0 nearest multiples of 10, everything changes, things break.

When you go from one person to three people it’s different. When it’s just you, you know what you are doing and then you have three people and you have to rethink how you are doing everything. But when there are 10 people it’s all going to change again. And when there are 30 people it will change again. Same when you reach 100 people.

— https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/the-rule-of-3-and-10/

Everything from team dynamics, communication tools and meetings to payroll and the intentional or natural formation of hierarchy is affected.

At Buttercloud, a team floating around the 6–10 person size, a change of plus or minus one can often have a palpable impact and require rethinking everything we are doing. A simple example would be how to maintain the practicality of our morning standup call as the number of attendees increases, that 20-30 minute call is suddenly approaching the hour mark.