Ever tried scheduling a single meeting with six cross-functional leads? Or watched a decision get rehashed in three different Slack threads? That’s not just a growing pain—it’s Metcalfe’s Law in action.
Metcalfe’s Law, originally created to explain the exponential value of telecommunications networks, states:
$$ \text{Value} \propto n^2 $$
Where ( n ) is the number of users (or nodes) in a network. More specifically, the number of potential connections in a network is:
$$ \frac{n(n - 1)}{2} $$
So when your team grows from 10 to 100 people, the possible communication lines don’t just grow tenfold—they grow from 45 to 4,950.
This isn’t just a cool math fact. It’s a strategic challenge.
As companies grow, they experience this law viscerally: more people, more conversations, more misalignment, more meetings, more overhead. The communication load increases exponentially—and if left unmanaged, it slows everything down.1
The Hidden Tax of Growth#
At 10 people, everything’s fast. Feedback is immediate. You don’t need a meeting to align.
But at 50? Or 150? You start feeling the drag: duplicated work, miscommunications, delays, disconnection. This is the invisible tax of scale. It’s not just the number of people—it’s the number of possible interactions between them.
That’s the dark side of Metcalfe’s Law: every connection is a potential misalignment, a delay, or a duplication of effort.
What Growth Really Requires: Constraints#
You can’t brute-force your way through complexity with more meetings or more tools. At a certain point, you need structure—not to slow people down, but to help them move with clarity.
Let’s break it down by size.
🟢 Small Companies (1–50 people): Speed Over Structure#
In small companies, communication is fast and informal. Direct access to decision-makers, tight feedback loops, and a shared context across the team enable quick action and alignment. But that speed can come at a cost—decision fatigue, unclear roles, and information overload are common pitfalls. To manage this, companies can start documenting lightly, define ownership early, and normalize asynchronous updates. Lightweight rituals like weekly retros or OKR check-ins help introduce structure without slowing things down.
🟡 Medium Companies (51–200): Complexity Kicks In#
Medium-sized companies begin to feel the strain of informal communication. Teams now need clearer boundaries and cross-functional coordination becomes more complex. What works well are documented processes, regular rituals across departments, and defined decision-making practices. Without these, knowledge silos form, responses slow down, and information falls through the cracks. Companies at this stage should invest in tools like Notion or Linear to structure knowledge, define who needs to talk to whom and when, and assign “connectors” to bridge domains. Critically, teams should document not just decisions, but the context and rationale behind them.
🔴 Large Companies (200+): The Illusion of Communication#
Large companies experience the illusion of communication—plenty of activity, but limited alignment. What tends to work is standardized process, clear accountability, and layered communication hierarchies. But this often leads to loss of innovation, weaker cultural cohesion, and slower responsiveness across the org. To combat this, companies need to design intentional intersections between teams—Google’s company-wide OKR model is a strong example. Internal storytelling rituals, structured flexibility through rotating roles or tiger teams, and internal mobility programs can help keep people connected across silos without constant reorgs.
High-Level Strategies That Work#
Consider two companies that illustrate the extremes of handling communication complexity:
1. Modular Teams with Clear Interfaces
Like clean APIs, teams should expose only what’s needed and document their inputs/outputs clearly. Shopify famously runs autonomous teams that ship independently, but all conform to a shared service contract model.2
2. Internal Documentation as Infrastructure
Invest in living documentation—internal wikis, runbooks, decision logs. Not just for onboarding, but as an active tool to reduce repeated conversations.
3. Invest in Connective Tissue Roles
Roles like program managers, solutions architects, or internal ops people keep teams aligned without forcing leaders into coordination overhead.
4. Keep the Org Legible
Everyone should know who owns what and how to engage them. Org charts, team charters, and “how we work” pages go a long way.
5. Rituals Over Rules
Regular all-hands, demos, async updates, and cross-functional reviews help keep people aligned without enforcing rigid control.
You can’t eliminate communication complexity—but you can make it navigable.
Concrete Examples: Slack, Quibi, and Shopify#
Let’s look at three companies that show how communication strategy (or the lack of it) plays out in real life.
Slack#
Slack built its internal operations to mirror the product they were building—clear, channel-based communication with strong async defaults. They minimized reliance on meetings by maintaining high-context discussion threads and public visibility. Leadership modeled this behavior, and teams aligned around documented decisions instead of live debates. Slack’s ability to scale while staying cohesive was due in large part to how deliberately they communicated internally—essentially “using Slack to build Slack.”3
Quibi#
Quibi, despite massive funding and industry backing, struggled with internal fragmentation. Marketing, product, and content teams operated in silos with few bridging mechanisms. Major decisions—like not allowing screenshots for social sharing—were made top-down without cross-functional testing or buy-in. Communication complexity overwhelmed their ability to adapt fast, especially after launch feedback poured in. The lack of shared context and delayed coordination contributed to the company’s rapid decline.4
Shopify#
Shopify scaled by decentralizing authority and using modular team structures. Each team was empowered to build, ship, and own their surface area, while adhering to clearly defined service contracts. Internal APIs, strong documentation, and well-established expectations around inter-team communication reduced the need for constant realignment. This created a balance between autonomy and coherence—allowing Shopify to move fast while staying internally legible.2
Final Thoughts: Structure Isn’t the Enemy#
Metcalfe’s Law shows us that communication complexity doesn’t grow linearly—it grows exponentially.
If you want to scale, you can’t just add people. You have to design how they communicate.
The best organizations don’t fight complexity—they shape it. They build intentional pathways, create clarity around ownership, and foster connection without chaos.
If things feel messy as you grow, it’s not your fault—it’s math.
But it’s also solvable—with design, not just effort.