No, they messed up. Regardless of user count, and economic context, there is a limit to how fast you can grow a company. Going beyond that limit means that you’re diluting internal company knowledge so much that everyone just ends up doing their own thing— it’s chaos. Quality control, standards, procedures, etc go out the window. You also loose your ability to create accurate, data-backed plans with a high degree of confidence the farther you get from where you are now. You can predict the impact of a few new hires pretty easily, but hundreds, when your current team is only a couple hundred? You simply can’t forecast what holes you are creating, and challenges you will encounter with that many new people (specifically, that high of a growth percentage) in that short a time period. Growing that fast is incredibly risky, and in almost all cases, a terrible business decision. I’ve worked for SEVERAL companies that have worked this way, and it always destroys the company from the inside out.