The assumption
The common story is that scaling breaks people — they get overworked, stretched thin, and eventually something gives. That's part of the picture, but it's not where the real fracture usually starts.
What is actually happening
What breaks first is almost always the decision-making pattern that worked at the previous size. A ten-person team can run on one person's judgment and a lot of informal conversation. An eighty-person team running the same way just produces a longer queue in front of that same person.
The implication
Hiring more people onto a decision pattern that doesn't scale doesn't fix the bottleneck — it just adds more people waiting behind it. The org chart grows; the actual throughput of decisions doesn't.
What to do differently
Before the next hiring round, map who actually makes which decisions today, and whether that pattern can hold at twice the current size. If it can't, redesigning decision rights is a higher-leverage move than adding headcount.