Infinity Org
A letter from the President and CEO of Anderson Lake detailing a bold new initiative for the future
When I started working at Anderson Lake earlier this year, I thought it was a normal corporate job like any other. I was just out of college and desperate for work, and there were many openings at the company. What was odd, however, was that no one hired me. I filled out an application online, and it disappeared into the void. I thought that would be the end of it. Almost none of my applications resulted in anything. No follow-ups, no interviews. Not even a polite email saying they had gone with another candidate. Nothing at all.
But Anderson Lake emailed me back within minutes. I was told to come into the Maple Grove office for what, I assumed, was an interview. Instead, I learned it was my first day on the job after my manager, Jamie Dinwood, showed me to my cubicle (#473214). I had heard of companies hiring people on the spot, but they were usually fast food joints desperate for anyone with a pulse.
I asked Jamie what I was supposed to be doing, and she told me someone from HR would be in touch. In the meantime, I should log into the system and complete all the online orientation (which consisted of 80s-style corporate videos about sexual harassment and workplace violence). When I asked if she was going to give me a tour of the office, she gave me a strange look. “If I gave you a tour, it would take all day. Months, even.”
It was only later, after I had left the company, that I learned about its odd hiring practices. They were trying to grow the company aggressively, and this included zero caps on hiring. I dug around online the other day and found this letter from the CEO, from shortly before I was hired.
September 17, 2024
Eden Prairie, MN, September 17, 2024 /PRNewsire/ — Anderson Lake [NYSE: AL] President and CEO Craig Oelkers shared the following message with all employees today
Team,
Our company faces unprecedented challenges in the face of our current environment. But unprecedented challenges mean unprecedented opportunities. It is hard to overstate how important the actions we take today, each and every one of us, for the long-term health of our company.
We will all need to make tough decisions to ensure the trust our customers have placed in us. For what is our goal but to provide best-in-class products and services to our diverse array of customers? And—of course—to provide security and advancement for our employees. The challenges we face today will not stop us from achieving our goals. But we need to be clear-eyed, sober even, about the path forward. We must never stop performing and innovating.
Over the last six months, our company has experienced unprecedented growth, which some have described as “eye-watering.” Unsustainable, though I do not use that word. There is much to celebrate, and much anxiety. Growth of this sort brings new challenges, new stressors on the team. I feel the stress. You feel the stress. How can we continue to deliver world-class products and services, and also scale? How do we tap the opportunities available to us, namely, infinite growth?
It is my job to ask these tough questions and then try and answer them. With that in mind, I am sharing an exciting new initiative that will allow our company to stay dominant. That will allow us to seize, with both hands, the growth opportunities available to us. That will allow us to grow into the type of company never before seen on this earth.
Effective immediately, I have instructed HR to remove all barriers to hiring. That’s right: we will hire anybody and everybody. Anyone across the org, including executives, managers, and employees, will have the power to hire staff. If you need more support, more resources to do your job, I empower you to reach out and take it.
We plan to build new facilities to house our new team members. Environment and Operations has begun the construction process immediately. These buildings will be as large as needed, larger than any corporate office ever built. Again, I stress there is no cap on the size and number of facilities we will build.
To serve our new team, HR will also grow indefinitely. I won’t pretend to understand all the nuance (or the math, but that’s what Science and Research is for), but I have been assured by the top minds in our company that HR can grow infinitely and still remain smaller than our overall staff, which will also grow to infinity1.
Infinite staff means infinite growth. Infinite growth allows us to maintain an infinite staff. We will never stop hiring. We will never stop growing. That is the vision I share with you all.
We know you will have many questions for our leadership team. We stand by, ready to tackle the challenges together. I will remain transparent with you regarding this new hiring and building initiative. The timing and impact, and so on. As always, I will be professional. I will be supportive. Think of me as your friend. Your best friend, even.
Craig
Contact:
Anderson Lake Media Relations
media@andersonlake.com
I dug into the company a little more and found a series of emails between the CEO and the Head of HR, published by Kim Wood at the Wall Street Journal. These emails were from early 2025, shortly after the announcement that the company would be removing its cap on employee count.
From: Craig Oelkers
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 10:11 AM
To: Caryn Williamson
Caryn,
Are we hiring fast enough? Growth continues to be explosive. That’s not even the right word. It’s volcanic. We’re talking full Plinian here. I mean, absolutely insane. I know you’re hiring a thousand people a day, but is that fast enough? If growth slows down even a little, if it dwindles to Vulcanian or, God forbid, Strombolian, the shareholders will have my head. And you know what that means for you.
Cheers and salutations,
Craig
From: Caryn Williamson
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2025, 3:42 PM
To: Craig Oelkers
Craig,
As we chatted about in the hall, the challenge to hiring more staff is hiring more HR staff to hire the staff. I managed to book a meeting with Ted Stone this morning, and he ran me through the numbers. The math and all that.
I know that you also struggle with the complexity of our goal. How difficult it is to plan and strategize around the concept of infinity. Don’t pretend that you don’t! Remember: I know your mind as well as your heart :)
As Ted reiterated, unlimited growth depends on several other infinities, “sub-infinities,” if you will. I won’t rehash all of the philosophical implications that lead us to the conclusion that people (or, using David Deutsch’s term, “universal explainers”) are the key to unlocking infinity2.
Ted told me to imagine all the employees of Anderson Lake numbered one to…well, infinity. You, of course, are number one, and I’d like to think you’d put me at number two :)
Anyway, what would you number our most recent employee (who, if our current velocity holds, was hired six seconds after I started typing this sentence)? It’s important to note that there is no “most recent” employee (another has been hired before I could get this sentence out). Furthermore, none of us currently working for the company is anywhere near this theoretical “most recent” hire. Imagine everyone’s office lined up in a row. We (number one and number two) are as infinitely far away from them as anyone else in the company. Even that person hired at the start of this paragraph is infinitely far away from the “most recent” hire. When dealing with the infinite, you have to put reason aside, which I know is hard for you (but not for me, apparently, as you love to remind me how emotional I can be ;)
All this to say that I have no idea how fast we are hiring anymore, because even our hiring rate acceleration is infinite at this point. Anyone who is hired can hire anyone else. My current concern is where to put all of these employees. I know you’ve instructed Tommy Greenhouse to build an infinite number of facilities that can house an infinite number of cubicles, but last I heard from him, all the cubicles were filled.
How could this be? Our organization always has room for more staff. The mathematicians were very clear on this.
I’d like to propose the following solution: whenever a new team member is hired, we should have the general managers announce to all the staff (they can use bullhorns or something) that they should shift to the cubicle numbered one more than the one they currently occupy. So, (and I just looked this up on Teams), Jason Sheffield, estimator out of Atlanta, currently occupies cubicle #42387. When his manager, Bob Bacon, announces a new employee (over the bullhorn), he would move himself and his personal effects to cubicle #42388. This would then free up the first cubicle for the new employee to occupy. I think you will agree that this approach quite elegantly solves the problem, as long as you can suspend your ordinary sense of reason (which is necessary for thinking about infinity :)
I understand the team might be annoyed at having to change desks so frequently. But I don’t think they’ll mind once they realize this is an excellent place to work! Our benefits are comprehensive, our professional development is clearly defined, and work-life balance is there. And it’s quite literally impossible to be fired. Not that we don’t fire people (we fire people all the time), but that, per our hiring mandate, anyone fired can simply reapply and is virtually guaranteed to be rehired.
But—and here’s where it gets exciting!—with infinite revenue, we can pay our staff better than anyone, with plenty left over for the shareholders (an infinite amount, in fact). With an infinite staff, we can offer vacation packages better than anyone in the industry. Even up to 365 days off per year. Let me explain. Imagine we calculate all the revenue generated by the contributions of employees 2 to 2,000. That’s more than enough to allow employee number one to stay at home. Next, we calculate all the contributions generated by employees 2,001 to 4,001. The revenue produced by those employees allows employee number two to stay home as well. And so on.
As you can see, none of our employees will need to work, and yet the company will generate enough revenue to pay for everyone.
Therefore, I can confidently answer your question: yes, we will continue to scale our hiring. In fact, once word gets out that employees at our company make outrageous salaries to stay at home, I anticipate everyone (and even all the people who are not yet born) will apply to work here.
Imagine an infinitely long queue of job applications in our system. We can hire them all at once! But, how do we fill those cubicles? It would be too awkward for our current staff to all move an infinite number of times to accommodate this infinite surplus of hires. Instead, the general manager will instruct (over the bullhorn) all current employees to shift to an odd-numbered cubicle. This then frees up all the even-numbered cubicles for the new employees.
I confirmed with Ted, the math works out. Since there are infinitely many even numbers and infinitely many odd numbers, we can accommodate both an infinite number of current employees and an infinite number of new employees.
Will you be joining me for lunch tomorrow? :)
Yours and well, truly,
Caryn
From: Craig Oelkers
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2025, 8:13 AM
To: Caryn Williamson
Caryn,
A simple yes or no would have sufficed. As you know, I am under tremendous pressure and have limited time for reading theoretical mathematical digressions. We are trying to create an actual business whose profits grow indefinitely, forever.
Also, watch what you put in your emails. IT can probably read them.
Cheers and salutations,
Craig
The office I worked in was enormous. Cubicles as far as you can see, in all directions. “Where do I get coffee?” I asked Jamie on my first day. She told me it was next to cubicle #482678, an almost mile-long walk from my desk.
Because the building was so large, too large for any janitorial staff to clean, we were instructed to pass our trash to the next cubicle at the end of the day. After a week at work, I heard the story of how Dan Spilo lost his wedding ring. Apparently, it slipped off his finger when he was passing his trash to the next cubicle. He only realized what had happened later that evening, when he got home, but by then it was too late. The next morning, Environment and Operations had everyone undo the previous day’s trash handoff, but the ring never materialized. They told poor Dan that his ring was gone forever.
“What do you mean, gone forever?” he said. “Just keep moving the trash back until it returns.”
“Unfortunately,” they explained, “nobody from any cubicle can return any trash because they have not received any from the cubicle numbered higher than theirs.” Nobody knows where any of the trash has gone, ever. It just keeps passing from cubicle to cubicle.
After a few days of orientation, I finally received my assignment. I was tasked with installing advertising pixels on our clients’ websites. This confused me because I didn’t realize that Anderson Lake provided digital marketing services. I thought they were a logistics and manufacturing company. Apparently, they offered web design and marketing, along with in-house creative services, alongside legal and compliance consulting and manufacturing.
I was bad at my job and hated it. During training, I was told that I would be adding the same pixel to every site, but this turned out to be untrue. Every site was different, and I had to change the pixel’s code to get it to work. I was never quite sure if I had done it correctly.
Well, after about six months on the job, I put the wrong pixel on the wrong site. I apparently added a 70% off coupon to a major retailer’s site, costing them over $1 million in revenue per hour.
I was canned immediately. They perp-walked me out of the office holding that sad little box of personal items. The last thing I remember seeing was all those cubicles, more than anyone could ever count, and all the people peering over the tops, watching some idiot get escorted out of the building by security.
This notion of two different “sizes” of infinity (countable vs. uncountable infinities) comes from Georg Cantor’s 1891 proof, known as the diagonal argument.
The “argument” that follows comes largely from David Deutsch’s chapter “A Window on Infinity” from his book, The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch lays out David Hilbert’s thought experiment about an infinite hotel, which I repurposed to imagine an infinitely large company.
This story does the title (Unnerving) justice! I, luckily, can only imagine how it would be working at an infinity office. I’d rather have infinity soup than be employed by this company…for infinity and beyond.