The tech industry is going through puberty

A love letter to every company navigating the messy middle.

I’ve built most of my career inside companies in what I think of as organizational puberty — usually somewhere in the $5M–$20M run range.

It’s an incredibly unique stage of company building. And the more I’ve watched it over the years, the more I’ve realized it mirrors something we all experience personally: being a teenager.

Early product-market fit hits and suddenly the company feels invincible. Something worked. The market responded. Maybe you raised capital. Momentum builds. And with that momentum comes a new sense of confidence — sometimes bordering on the belief that you’ve figured everything out.

At the same time, the organization gains new freedoms and new resources. You start hiring faster. Teams expand. Budgets grow. New initiatives pop up. Things that once required careful tradeoffs suddenly feel possible.

But just like teenagers growing into their bodies, companies in this stage often look a little awkward along the way.

Coordination becomes harder. People step on each other’s toes. Teams that once operated in the same room now work across functions, priorities, and time horizons. The company can no longer behave like a group of five-year-olds chasing the same soccer ball.

Everyone now has a position to play. And that means trust has to start to replace visibility.

The leadership tightrope

This stage requires a specific kind of leadership. You’re no longer just a player executing alongside the team. But you’re not purely a coach operating from the sidelines either.

You have to see the whole field while still being close enough to the action to understand how decisions are actually being made. You need the altitude to guide direction while also having the experience to recognize small choices that could compound into bigger consequences later.

It’s a constant balancing act between perspective and proximity. When that balance slips, the symptoms start to show.

Teams stay busy, but returns flatten. Effort increases, but outcomes don’t compound the way they should. Waste grows quietly — not because people aren’t working hard, but because work is happening in slightly different directions.

Silos form. Teams make locally rational decisions without seeing how those choices interact with the rest of the organization. Meetings get added to try to restore alignment. And suddenly the company that just expanded its capacity feels overwhelmed by coordination overhead.

The team is executing constantly but struggling to see past the next thirty days.

This stage can feel chaotic. But it’s also where companies either mature or drift into permanent misalignment.

Why I love this stage

Despite how uncomfortable it can be, this is actually my favorite phase of company building. It’s where leadership really matters.

It’s where companies learn the difference between working harder and working in the same direction.

The organizations that navigate this stage successfully develop a kind of operational awareness that compounds over time. They learn how to maintain shared direction even as teams grow and priorities change. They learn how to scale judgment without slowing momentum. And they learn how to turn fast-moving execution into actual learning instead of just activity.

But recently I’ve noticed something interesting. What used to be a very stage-specific challenge is starting to show up everywhere.

AI just threw the entire industry into puberty

For years, this awkward coordination phase mostly happened in the middle stages of company growth.

Early startups were small enough that everyone had context on everything. Large enterprises had developed the management structures and processes to handle scale. Measured change became the main operating model.

But AI has shifted the underlying dynamics. Suddenly, teams everywhere have access to dramatically more execution power. We can build faster, ship faster, generate assets instantly, and run experiments that previously required entire teams.

In other words, we just experienced a massive increase in capacity.

Which feels very similar to what happens when a startup finds product-market fit and raises a round. The organization wakes up with more resources and more possibilities than its operating system was designed to handle.

When doing becomes easy, direction becomes hard

Historically, execution friction acted as a kind of stabilizer inside organizations. Work moved slowly enough that alignment problems surfaced early.

But when execution becomes cheap and fast, that natural feedback loop weakens.

Teams can build quickly without fully understanding how their decisions interact with others. Experiments compound before the broader implications are clear. Local optimizations spread through the system before anyone realizes they’re pulling the organization slightly off course.

From the inside, everything still looks productive. Work is happening. Output is increasing. Progress feels tangible.

But over time, small shifts accumulate. And by the time leaders notice, the organization may already be far from where it originally intended to go.

This is the same dynamic that makes the teenage stage of a company so volatile. Capability grows faster than coordination systems and waste grows.

The missing infrastructure

What this moment is revealing is that most companies were never built with strong infrastructure for maintaining shared direction.

We have systems for execution: project management tools, ticketing systems, documentation platforms.

We have systems for communication: chat, meetings, collaboration tools.

But for most organizations our infrastructure for observing how decisions actually evolve across the company over time is strategy slide decks and OKR planning sessions.

When direction changes, those shifts propagate quietly through dozens of downstream choices — product tradeoffs, roadmap adjustments, hiring priorities, messaging updates. Each decision makes sense locally, but the broader pattern is difficult to see while it’s happening.

So organizations rely on something fragile: human memory, scattered notes, and periodic alignment meetings. That approach worked when execution moved slowly. It breaks down when decisions (and change) happen faster than people can track them and reorient the whole.

The next phase of organizational maturity

As execution accelerates, the companies that thrive won’t simply be the ones that build the fastest. They’ll be the ones that can see their own direction clearly while they move and learn through their stumbles.

Leaders will need the ability to observe how decisions connect, how assumptions evolve, and how small shifts in reasoning ripple through the system over time. Not to control every decision. But to understand whether the organization is still heading where it believes it is.

Because when capability expands faster than coordination, the real challenge isn’t doing more. It’s steering well.

And right now, much of the tech industry is relearning what it means to do that.

In other words, the industry just entered puberty again. And like every teenager eventually discovers, growing faster isn’t the hard part. Learning what it means to go through that growth is.

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