We're a 33-year-old small company, with thirty employees. I started the company in 1992 to do custom programming (VB and MS Access) and network support (Novell NetWare). I slowly grew to five employees. In 2000 I did not enjoy billing out our hours, so I decided to develop a product -- a web-based issue tracking application to help with IT support. The transition from a services business to a product business was much more difficult than I anticipated, but we made it. Now Issuetrak is doing fine. From what I read on Hacker News, there are nice aspects to working in a small company. We have no outside investment, so we call our own shots. Everyone is close to the customers. We listen to all team members' ideas. Everyone knows who is contributing. We can work from home. After 25 years of taking customer suggestions, our product is robust. We provide prompt, very good telephone support. We win deals (and lose them too) against competitors that are 400 times our size. One of the biggest satisfactions is that when we survey our customers after each support encounter, it is not unusual to hear them say that Issuetrak is the best software company they've ever dealt with. My salary is probably less than that of many FANG engineers, but life is good.
The notion of "what is small" is interesting.
I think of small mom and pop shops.
But compared to the "giants" of which there are several
30 is really small.
The US SBA (Small Business Administration) has a table of industries with their definition of small using either dollar amount of receipts or number of employees:
This link is fascinating. I had no idea that the U.S. government definition of small business was so elaborate. I asked ChatGPT, and it turns out there are 978 industries, covered by 102 different size standards! Why did they come up with this? If a company meets their criteria, it can qualify for government contracts, loans, grants, advocacy programs and more.
According to ChatGPT:
To come up with this list, the U.S. Census Bureau provides detailed information on industries, including employment, revenue, and business structure. SBA economists analyze factors like average firm size, capital intensity, and industry concentration to determine reasonable thresholds for “small businesses.” They study the competition between small and large businesses in federal procurement, considering small businesses’ ability to compete for contracts. The annual budget for the SBA is $1 billion. This does not include $50 billion in various loan programs.
I think a company is small whilst all the employees could conceivably fit into a house party. That is perhaps a better metric here in the UK where there are fewer colossal houses. But hopefully you get the idea.
I would say below 50 employees is small, not quite mom&pop but small enough that you know everyone and there aren’t different separate “departments” in the company.
Also what is medium. Currently working with company having couple hundred employees. Doing consulting and own products. Small compared to thousands or tens of thousand of large companies in field. But not anymore small even by EU rules...
