I think that powers of ten serve as a great metric for dividing up companies. First, you’ve got a company of 1–a sole proprietorship, which can be anything from a hugely successful public speaker to a guy driving a cab to a student who decides that being a “consultant” is better than being unemployed. Then you’ve got 10, which is the first “real” company…you have responsibilities, as a CEO, to make sure that your people are taken care of, because at least 5 or 6 of them are depending on you for benefits and salary. 100 is a level that few startups even reach, where you’re bigger than small, dealing with issues of scalability and liability and HR, starting to get noticed by the big boys, and having to really, really worry about whether or not they’re going to just squash you out of existence. At this stage, either you stay a niche player forever, or you figure out how to get really, really big, really fast, before you get eaten. There are big decisions to be made around 100.
At 1000, you’re a firm, not a company. You’re thinking about putting your logo on the building you lease. You either own a space entirely, or you’re a big player in an even bigger space. At 10,000, your hiring and firing patterns can determine the life and death of small towns. You are a juggernaut. If you’re bigger than that, you’re almost too big to fail. You sell sugar water internationally, or determine the media habits of continents. You are a corporation-state.