As soon as your new startup has some actual endusers a fear of changes sets in.  What if people don’t like it?  What if they start to protest?  I sometimes meet startups with only thousands of users that are firmly in the grip of this fear.  That’s why it is so awesome to see companies such as Facebook and Twitter with hundreds of millions of users still make big changes to their services.

As of today I have “New New Twitter” – while it doesn’t represent some fundamental change in how Twitter functions, it is a fairly radical redesign of the enduser experience.  It is the kind of big change that companies often need to get from one level of scale to another.  Facebook’s introduction of the news feed is maybe the best example of this: a dramatic change that was protested strongly by many people and yet was essential to growth and engagement.

This is not just true for companies but also individuals and families.  That’s why at home we are in the process of just such a change: moving from the suburbs back to the city!