We Do Not Understand Scale

Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about numbers that don't make sense. Like how there are more possible games of chess than atoms in the observable universe. These aren't just math tricks—they're glimpses into something our brains simply weren't built to grasp: the weird, wonderful, terrifying reality of scale.

We live in a world where understanding scale isn't just academic curiosity anymore. It's the difference between building something that works for your friends and building something that changes the world. And honestly? Most of us are terrible at it.

When Small Becomes Big (And Everything Breaks)

Picture this: you're in your dorm room with your roommate, building a simple app where people can share photos with captions. You test it with your floor—maybe 30 people. Everyone loves it. The photos load instantly, everyone knows everyone, and it feels intimate and fun.

Fast forward three years. Somehow, your little photo app now has 500 million people using it every day. Those same features that worked perfectly for 30 people? They're completely broken. You can't just buy a bigger computer and call it a day. The entire universe of your creation has fundamentally shifted.

Now you need servers scattered across the globe because someone in Tokyo can't wait three seconds for a photo from someone in New York. You need algorithms that can scan billions of images to detect inappropriate content because you can't hire enough humans to look at them all. You need systems that work even when entire countries lose internet connection. What started as "let's share photos with friends" became "let's build infrastructure that rivals what governments use."

This isn't just a tech story. Imagine starting a small bakery that makes 50 loaves a day for your neighborhood. Your grandmother's recipe, your own two hands, personal relationships with every customer. Beautiful, right? Now imagine that same recipe needs to feed 50 million people daily across six continents. You can't just build a really, really big oven. You need food scientists, supply chains that span oceans, quality control systems, automated machinery that never sleeps. The soul of what you created—that personal touch, that human connection—it has to be preserved in an entirely different form.

Toyota figured this out when they went from making a few hundred cars to making millions. They couldn't just hire more workers and build bigger factories. They had to invent entirely new ways of thinking about how things get made, how people work together, how quality gets maintained when you're coordinating hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of countries. They had to reimagine what it means to make something.

Talking About the Unimaginable

Here's what I think nobody says about trying to grow big: explaining scale to humans is nearly impossible. How do you walk into a room of smart, capable people and say, "Hey, we need to prepare for serving a billion people" without sounding completely insane?

I think about this a lot. Like, if your food delivery app currently handles 100 orders a day and you're telling your team to design for 10,000, you're not just talking about bigger numbers. You're talking about a world where Jennifer, your friendly customer service person, can't personally help everyone anymore. Where your simple system for matching drivers with customers becomes this complex dance of algorithms predicting where people will be hungry before they even know it themselves.

The trick is making it real for people, translating abstract numbers into human experiences they can feel in their bones. Instead of saying "we need to handle network congestion at scale," you say "remember how the Wi-Fi in our dorm slows to a crawl when everyone's streaming Netflix during finals week? You can literally feel the internet groaning under the weight of a thousand students binge-watching The Office instead of studying organic chemistry. Now imagine that feeling, but with millions of people, scattered across time zones, and if it breaks, people can't video call their grandparents on their birthdays, can't see photos of their newborn nieces, can't tell their partners they're running late." Suddenly it's not abstract anymore—it's personal, human, urgent.

A company with 10 people can run group chats and small meetings, everyone gathered around a single table where decisions happen through eye contact and half-finished sentences. A company with 1,000 people and 20 departments needs actual and well-refined systems, documentation, processes that don't depend on everyone knowing everyone else's phone number or remembering who's good at fixing the printer.

But here's where it gets interesting: the companies that achieve massive scale don't just grow bigger—they evolve entirely different DNA. They develop what I think of as "scale muscles," organizational superpowers that only emerge under extreme growth pressure. They learn to duplicate their culture across thousands of people who've never met the founders, to maintain quality standards when they can't personally inspect every output, to make decisions that affect millions of users they'll never speak to.

The most successful ones figure out how to stay human while becoming superhuman. They create systems that scale, but experiences that feel personal. They build processes that can handle millions of edge cases, but still make each user feel like the app was designed just for them. It's like being a master chef who figures out how to maintain the soul of their grandmother's recipe while feeding an entire city—the ingredients might be sourced from industrial suppliers, the cooking might happen in massive, automated kitchens, but somehow each bite still tastes like love.

The Beautiful Paradox

The thing that keeps me up at night isn't just the technical challenge of scale—it's the philosophical weirdness of it. You have to design for billions of people you'll never meet while staying obsessively focused on whether the first ten people actually care about what you're building.

It's like being an architect who has to design a house that could theoretically fit every person on Earth, but first you need to prove that your family actually wants to live in the first room you build. The foundation has to be strong enough for skyscrapers, but the experience has to be intimate enough for a single person to find meaningful.

Some companies get so excited about building for scale that they forget to build for humans. They create these massive, technically impressive systems that nobody actually wants to use. Others build beautiful, personal experiences that completely fall apart the moment they become popular. The magic happens in that strange middle ground where you're thinking impossibly big while caring impossibly deeply about the smallest details.

Scale isn't just about bigger numbers or better technology. It's about holding two opposing truths in your mind at the same time: that you're building something small and human, and something vast and planetary, and somehow both things need to be true simultaneously.

Maybe that's why we don't understand scale. It requires us to think like humans and gods at the same time. And honestly? That's kind of beautiful.