One of my friends worked at Stripe but left because she said that management is made up of young OGs that don't know how to manage but they've been at Stripe for so long they are rich and think they know what they're doing. It's hard to get real work done because of this from what I've heard.
To be fair, this can apply to a lot of young companies.
Fundamentally, the job to work in a startup is different from the job to work at a large company. The people that grew a company when it was small might not be the best people to grow a company when it becomes bigger.
I saw this at a previous company where the OGs were convinced they were untouchable because they created the entire technical solution with a handful of engineers. To their credit, it was an amazing accomplishment. Unfortunately, as the company grew, their solution ran into scalability and reliability concerns that couldn't be easily fixed. In every architecture meeting, there was always the disagreements between team "ten years ago, this product would have already been shipped with half the engineers" and team "but that product wouldn't work with the scale we need - it is an exponentially harder problem now"
Although sometimes they are right as well. It's often layers of people with many different lines between them slowing down the overal pace of development.
I don't buy the argument that ensuring scalability equals long processes. But I do believe that when the product grows in terms features, components etc, the pace also decreases. Even in the perfect multilithic software solution.
