Since 2018, Snowed In Studios grew from 25 engineers to 170 developers, in a global organization that scaled from 6,000 employees to 10,000. We encountered pitfalls, a global pandemic, and *then* came surprises in studio culture, rapid growth, change management and ways of operating – lots of things broke. If you want to keep your sanity, follow the business textbooks and keep your studio small, or go into online retail. If you are a glutton for punishment and high growth, this talk will touch on how textbook MBA lessons don’t always work, real-world scaling, strategic planning, and why innovation fails or succeeds