I feel like this is pretty well known; not that recipes can't be scaled, but that you can't reliably do it by multiplying the ingredients.

I just flipped through Ferran Adria's "The Family Meal", which is a record of every house meal served at El Bulli, each of which is scaled to 2, 6, 20, and 40 people. Sure enough, almost none of them scale every ingredient linearly (Caesar salad and hamburgers did, because you just make more dressing or more patties for more people).

In particular: oil, butter, lemon juice, onions, and intensely flavored seasoning ingredients (herbs in particular) often scaled by 2x when the servings scaled by 3x. In some places, an ingredient scaled by more than 3x to make 3x as many servings. Salt went in both directions.

Author here.

The typo about Rob's name is a bit embarrassing. I've asked the editor to correct it.

You are correct, IH was started in 2016, I could have sworn it was started earlier.

It's hard for me to put an exact date on this, but I entered university in 2010 and I remembered reading about startups almost from my first or second year.

Paul Grahams essays, Zero to One, The Family (french thing), Rocket Internet, VC etc.

This whole thing kind of fascinated me, but reading about it felt like watching a soccer game. I was just a spectator of a world I though I could never be a part of. Probably a mix of lack of confidence and unwillingness to takes risks.

But then I discovered this whole bootstrapping thing, IH, Rob's books, Kalzumeus essays and for the first time, I was reading about thing I could see myself doing.

Even though you didn't ask, I hope it clears things up :)

PS: My english being a bit clunky, this article was editorialized quite a bit

PSS: Thanks for the kind words

Off topic:

I learned about The Borgias while reading Mario Puzzo’s The Family. He spent like 20 years doing historical research about the family and their business and compiled a very entertaining book if you’re a history nerd which also likes a good narrative (even if that means concealing a little bit the historical strictness).

Mario Puzzo (yes, The Godfather’s author) died before publishing the novel and his girlfriend published it instead; the last few chapters are clearly hurried and that’s why you’d read bad reviews online. But I really enojoyed it.