The leadership at Coinbase, Lyft, Checkr and other high-flying startups are grateful that their coach, Khalid Halim, didn’t skip out on a class called Military Science as an undergrad at UCLA. What he thought was a throwaway course delivered one of his most valuable insights:
“I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. So, the most efficient group in the military is a group of three, then a group of eight, and then three groups of eight, so 24,” says Halim.
