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

I generally think matrixed is death, so I’m always pushing companies to go to a flat structure of independent teams. I’m really on the Jeff Bezos program on that, the two-pizza team thing.2 I think hierarchies kill innovation for the most part. And I think that matrixes are just lethal in most cases. There are exceptions, but in most cases, you nee

Remember, board meetings exist to (1) help the company and (2) provide proper corporate governance for all classes of stock. In order to make a board meeting effective, the CEO should try to do the following prior to the meeting: 1. Send out the board deck and other materials at least 48–72 hours before the meeting. You want people to have a chance

However, the ultimate role of product management is making or suggesting trade-offs between the pristine, platonic ideal of beauty that the design team wants, the technical pizzazz engineering desires, the “just give me some shit I can sell” of sales, and the “this may be risky” of legal (these examples are all purposefully exaggerated).

If you’re working on an early-stage product, even within a company that has a more mature product, that shorter-term plan looks different. You probably don’t know what X and Y metrics are yet. You’re still in the milestone mode. Any planning process needs to accommodate product life cycle, if you will. You want to establish buckets that the company

Make a list of the people most likely to be unhappy with the change and reach out to them quickly after the announcement,or speak to them before the change if necessary. Make sure to later be accessible to these people later so you can explain the reasoning first-hand.

The next thing you look for is: What are the key zones of expertise, networks, ways of thinking that add the most value into the company that you couldn’t hire for? Because if you can hire it, great, hire it. Add it into the genetics of the company. But there are a bunch of people like, for example, me or Peter Chernin—you can’t hire us into the co

On the sourcing side, one big obstacle is that people’s networks are really homogenous, especially along racial and ethnic lines and along educational-background lines. Our networks are filled with mostly people who are similar to us, and when you’re at a fairly early stage you rely heavily on your networks to build your company. Companies that wan

The problem with that is true defensibility purely at the product level is really rare in the Valley, because there are a lot of really good engineers. And there are new ones every day, whether they’re coming out of Stanford or coming in from other countries or whatever. And then there’s the issue of leap-frogging. The next team has the opportunity

When hiring executives, look for people who have the experience and background that would make them a good fit or hire for the next 12–18 months. Anything shorter than that and they will not be able to scale sufficiently far relative to the time it takes to hire them. Anything longer and you will over-hire and end up with someone who is a bad fit f