Teen cheerleader forced into split: "The world is a scary place"

1. Mehta enforced a hard limit: no team at Instacart could exceed 8 people. When teams hit that size, he forced splits into two separate units with new missions. Managers protested that this created redundancy and chaos. Mehta fired three VPs who lobbied to build traditional 30-person departments. The company scaled to 10,000 employees while maintaining startup velocity. 2. The principle came from Amazon's