> If I ever made a mistake at Google that cost the company $10 million, I would suffer no consequences. I’d be asked to write a post-mortem, and everyone would celebrate the learning opportunity. For most of these founders, a $10 million mistake would mean the end of their business and several lifetimes of debt.
This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers.
I think that's true, and obviously there are a lot more situations at Google than a small company where you're even in a position to lose $10m.
But not all costs are proportional to company size. I could screw up a command on my AWS account and rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars cloud costs. I could make that mistake at a $1M/yr business or a $500/yr business.
> This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers.
Percentages are hard to calculate in large companies. Is it a multiple of the engineer's salary? A percentage of the team's budget? The org? The company?
This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers.