High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

A company that grows that rapidly is literally a different company every six months. This means that every 6–12 months the company’s org structure may change. When choosing an organizational structure for your high-growth startup, focus on the next 6–12 months. Don’t try to find the “long-term” solution, as in the long term your company will be com

If you’re a very sales-oriented founder, then you might get somebody to augment on the product side. If you’re a very product-oriented founder, you might get somebody to augment on the sales side. If you’re a very sales- and product-oriented founder, you might get somebody to augment you on the pure operational infrastructure side. There are so man

Can we divide and conquer in a very collaborative way? Being a COO at times can be a very thankless job, where you have to leave your ego aside to some extent. So you have to make sure that you have a very collaborative structure, and that each person deeply respects the other person. You have to make sure it’s somebody that you do want to spend a

Typically, the only real “legal” capability of a chair (depending on charter and state of incorporation) is the ability to call for a board meeting independently of the CEO (assuming the roles are split). In early-stage startups, the title “chair” is pretty meaningless; most won’t have a stand-alone chair.

I am shocked by the absence of M&A relative to what I would expect in the environment. And I would say there’s no question that the big new tech incumbents are not buying enough stuff just on the math. I think it’s just kind of obvious. In the old days, their predecessor companies were far more aggressive at building up their positions for M&am

The problem is, the early adopters are only ever a small percentage of the overall market. And so a lot of founders, especially technical ones, will convince themselves that the rest of the market behaves like the early adopters, which is to say that the customers will find them. And that’s just not true.

In order to add 500 people a year you need to change the way you approach and scale your recruiting organization, you need to think deeply about employee onboarding, and you need to maintain and evolve your culture. In this chapter we cover these and other shifts required to hire and manage talent.

The trick to being effective at this is that you have to get really good at saying no and just not doing things. There are a lot of things that are urgent but not important. The hard part of being a good CEO is that you have to be willing to let some things fall apart. You don’t have enough time to do everything well. And in practice, what that mea

founders hired a CEO, that CEO is essentially a third founder. And actually, as you’ve read, my view of the key thing in hiring a CEO is to look at it as bringing on a later-stage cofounder.18 That’s actually the key thing that most people don’t think about in a CEO hiring process that’s really important to do.

As an early employee they are likely a large equity holder in the business and should act with you to maximize equity value. Often, CEOs try to find early employees a place where they won’t do much harm, versus a place they will excel. If you find yourself thinking this way, 99% of the time the right answer is to part ways with the early employee.