Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.
This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.
I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context.
In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head.
That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like.
Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people. it was a great way to get additional context that was otherwise hidden
How many start ups fail vs how many are successful, again?
In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...
But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.
[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]