FTX's Small Engineering Team

A story about how FTX, a $30 billion crypto company, operated with surprisingly few employees compared to other tech companies.

"I read something very interesting about FTX. For the first year, the product was built by just 2 engineers, and even now they only have sub-20 or sub-30 engineers. When asked about this at the Sohn conference, Sam Bankman-Fried was questioned whether FTX simply had a unique set of problems that allowed them to operate differently, or if everyone else was doing it wrong. He responded, 'The latter.'

He explained that when he looked at tech companies like Facebook and Google, from what he could gather, they employ an order of magnitude more people than they need to. When asked how many people Facebook should optimally have, he said if they have 50,000 employees, that's somewhere between 5 to 30 times too many.

He believes this is the most common reason successful companies decay. It becomes a race between how quickly new employees can understand the culture and how fast people are hired. If you're growing at 50% a year, maybe you can still mentor each new recruit. But if you're growing 300% a year, each employee only has 4 months to learn before they have to start teaching others."