My first questions would be (1) how big is/was the team? (2) how experienced? (3) how fast were you growing/changing? (4) without any sort of process or documentation how did you handle performance reviews (good and bad), promotions, growth? I'd also bet that your lead was (a) really good and (b) doing 2 jobs.
IME smaller organizations with experienced & stable teams can do fine without formal management, especially if the system is small enough to fit entirely in you head. Beyond that you need some form of management.
Aside: you come off at best somewhat ignorant or less charitable as kind of a jerk; there's a lot more to running a software company than writing code by yourself. We get it; you think all managers are useless MBA suits, but some of us actually still self-identify as devs that just want to improve the systems that build software. You can only get so far focusing solely on individual improvement.
IME smaller organizations with experienced & stable teams can do fine without formal management, especially if the system is small enough to fit entirely in you head. Beyond that you need some form of management.
Aside: you come off at best somewhat ignorant or less charitable as kind of a jerk; there's a lot more to running a software company than writing code by yourself. We get it; you think all managers are useless MBA suits, but some of us actually still self-identify as devs that just want to improve the systems that build software. You can only get so far focusing solely on individual improvement.