We’re living in an age where software is built for scale—designed to handle millions of users, built with complex infrastructure, and driven by massive teams. On the surface, this sounds like a dream. Who wouldn’t want to create something that could touch the lives of so many people? But the reality is, the more we try to scale, the less we actually innovate. We lose sight of what made the work interesting in the first place.

Here’s the problem: scale and innovation are at odds with each other.

When you're small, you’re nimble. You can make decisions quickly, experiment, and adapt without a mountain of process weighing you down. You can focus on what truly matters—the product, the people who use it, and the experience you're crafting for them. But when you scale, things change. Suddenly, the focus shifts from innovation to optimization. You’re not building something new; you’re just keeping the machine running.

Building software at scale means dealing with the headaches of operational complexity. There's an entire business to run—support systems, teams, infrastructure, legacy code. All of these moving parts weigh you down, and the bigger the company, the more you’re forced to optimize for efficiency instead of creativity. The “big ideas” you once had are now filtered through layers of management, bureaucracy, and process. By the time you get approval to act, the spark is gone.

Let’s face it—when was the last time you saw a truly innovative product come from a large, scaled organization? Sure, they might improve incrementally, but that’s not innovation. Real innovation—the kind that excites people and challenges the status quo—comes from small teams that aren’t burdened by the need to operate at scale. It’s the result of creative freedom, autonomy, and the ability to take risks without worrying about maintaining a massive, complicated system.

Scale is seductive. It promises growth, profitability, and market domination. But it’s also a trap. Once you go down that road, it’s almost impossible to turn back. You can’t go back to being nimble once you've built a monolith. You can’t recapture the scrappiness of a startup when you’re running a multi-million-dollar operation. At best, you end up hobbling along, making minor improvements to a product that’s lost its soul.

So, where does that leave us? The hard truth is that we need to rethink what success looks like. Instead of chasing scale, we should focus on staying small and staying special. There’s power in being small. You can create something unique, take care of your customers, and keep innovating without the weight of an empire on your shoulders. Because in the end, software built at scale might make money—but it rarely makes a difference.