Coordination and decision making is hard.
“in the premodern world—when processing information and coordinating action were both extraordinarily expensive, because communication was slow and coordination outside of relatively small kinship groups was difficult—firms tended to be local concerns, centered either around families or similarly high-trust networks like monasteries. Almost every business in the world was a family business.”
https://davidoks.blog/p/how-the-spreadsheet-reshaped-america