What Does It REALLY Mean To Do Things That Don't Scale?

**Michael Seibel** (0:00)
The moment I remember on my first test ride on cruise that I'll never forget is we're driving down 101 and Kyle says, oh, a shadow. Let's see how the car handles that. And I was like, oh shit, Kyle, what? Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and today we're gonna talk about what does it really mean to do things that don't scale. This term was massively popularized in a PGSA from 2013, but it was advice that he'd been giving YC founders for a really long time.
But Dalton, it seems like a lot of founders get this confused.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:32)
Doing things that don't scale is doing something that's provocatively manual on your part, where you, the founder, does a thing, personally, and that isn't counting on a lot of code that you're writing or scalable processes to run how you think late stage companies are run.

**Michael Seibel** (0:54)
Might help for us to give some examples.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:55)
Let's give examples.

**Michael Seibel** (0:58)
Reddit. So day one, Reddit exists, site, no links.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:05)
No users.

**Michael Seibel** (1:07)
No users. Blank page. But click a button to submit a link.
What do you do if you're Steve and Alexis?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:14)
So the scalable solution is you first launch subreddits, then you run ads to recruit people to come sign up for Reddit on different topics, and then hold on, then you would hire an influencer.
You have an influencer strategy to get influencers on various topics to come moderate the subreddits. And so the day you launch, you have this big splashy launch with hundreds of thousands of signups. That scales.

**Michael Seibel** (1:41)
That scales. What Steve and Alexis did was they made a little tool that allowed them to submit a link. The same thing that normal users used, but they had a little extra field where they could put in a username. And they just started inventing different usernames and submitting links like them. So day one, when they emailed this to their like six friends, it looked like there was a page full of users, when in fact there were two users.
And I remember Steve tells two stories. The story, the first day someone else other than them submitted a link, which was not day one.
And then he tells another story where like, I think he went out and he got drunk, and the next morning he had forgotten to like load up this morning's fake links. And he thought the site would just be blank, and he was like so pissed at himself. But then he opens up the site, and it looked like there were enough other people submitting links that the site wasn't blank. And then he was like, and that might have been what 20 or 30 people, right? And he's like, oh, wow, like major milestone. What was the DoorDash door, Dalton?

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:56)
Well, look, when you think about something like food delivery, you imagine it's scaling, you want to be doing hundreds of orders a day. And so the way the founders got started was they just did all the deliveries themselves. They didn't have to hire anyone or build a driver app or recruit drivers. If someone made an order via DoorDash, if some miracle happened and someone made an order, the founders would drop everything and go deliver the food.
Right? That was actually how they got started. Go ahead.

**Michael Seibel** (3:29)
What's so cool about that is that one of the other topics in this essay is like delight your users, right?
Well, the easiest way to delight your user when you're doing food delivery is you do the delivery yourself, right? You race to the freaking restaurant. You make sure you get the right thing. You throw in an extra. You deliver it yourself. You say thank you. They didn't have to deal with managing a driver network, motivating them.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:52)
And think about all the other ancillary benefits where they got to see why it was hard to do the deliveries. They got to talk to the restaurant owners personally and develop a relationship with them. They got to talk to their users. They were like, hey, here's your burrito. I'm the founder of this company.
Do you like it? Would you order again? Isn't that funny? Could you imagine a more lower status thing?
Of course not, but that's why it was awesome. It was not scalable. In present day, if you order from DoorDash, Tony is not going to deliver your burrito, or he might statistically. He still does this sometimes. I'm sure everyone saw the news. He still does this. To this day, the founders still do deliveries.