More Context Per Head

Prioritize fewer people with deeper context over more people with shallow knowledge

Eric Simons
Inside Bolt: From near-death to one of the fastest-growing products in history

More Context Per Head

"Less people, and more context per head. That's just been how we do it, and we feel very strongly about it." - Eric Simons

What It Is

This framework is an organizational design principle that prioritizes depth of context over headcount. Instead of hiring more specialists with narrow knowledge, you maintain a smaller team where everyone has comprehensive understanding of the company, product, and challenges.

StackBlitz scaled to $40M ARR with only 15-20 people. Eric Simons attributes this to having a core group of five to seven people who have been together for five-plus years. This is unusual in Silicon Valley, where turnover typically means people stay at a startup for one to two years before moving on.

The key insight: high context per person enables independent, high-quality decision-making without coordination overhead.

How It Works

Benefits of More Context Per Head:

  1. High trust - You can trust anyone's judgment because they understand the full picture
  2. Agency - People can execute front-to-back without needing approvals
  3. No political friction - No committees to navigate, no fiefdoms to protect
  4. Better decisions - Everyone independently making choices that are "generally, by default, more often correct"

The Trade-off:

  • You can't scale headcount quickly
  • You can't take bets that require lots of parallel work
  • Onboarding new people takes longer
  • But you gain speed through reduced coordination costs

How to Apply It

  1. Resist hiring until absolutely necessary - Each new hire dilutes average context

  2. Invest heavily in shared context - Eric's team meets daily (see Zero Fidelity Loss) specifically to maintain shared understanding

  3. Hire for context-building capability - Look for people who are intrinsically motivated to understand the whole, not just their piece

  4. Accept longer onboarding - New hires need time to build context before they can operate autonomously

  5. Hire from your community - StackBlitz's best hires came from people who were already users, already familiar with the product and mission

When to Use It

  • Pre-product-market fit when exploration requires judgment
  • When building complex technical products
  • When speed of decision-making matters more than parallelization
  • During hypergrowth when you need everyone to adapt quickly

When to Reconsider

At some point, you do need to scale. Eric acknowledges they're beginning to splinter off into separate syncs as the team grows. The key is recognizing that more context per head is most valuable when the work is exploratory and judgment-intensive. As work becomes more defined and repeatable, specialization can increase.

Connection to Long-Term Teams

This framework explains why StackBlitz benefited from unusual team stability. When your competitive advantage comes from accumulated context, turnover is devastating. It's not just losing a person—it's losing years of context that took years to build.

This is why Eric emphasizes hiring people who don't care about titles, who are motivated by building cool things, and who chuck their ego at the door. These traits correlate with longevity.

Source

  • Guest: Eric Simons
  • Episode: "Inside Bolt: From near-death to one of the fastest-growing products in history"
  • Key Discussion: (00:36:00) - Explanation of the context-per-head principle
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

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