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

It’s super important that employees have a great experience from week one and that includes everything, from making sure the laptop actually works to making sure they are invited to the right meetings. All the little things really do add up at this stage. Internal comms is playing a much bigger role in employee engagement and satisfaction than it e

Hiring a COO is not about adding a title to your org chart, but rather finding the background and experience you are looking for. Optimally, you want someone who will come in to complement, operationalize, and execute your vision as a founder. Many technical or product-focused founders want to (and should) remain focused on the product and overall

Most of these companies are examples where both power and equity splits between founders were unequal. In general, equal power sharing yields worse outcomes than having a dominant cofounder (or at least one who emerges as dominant once a company starts working). Founding a company is hard, and having a cofounder helps balance the work and stress of

Many companies make the mistake of spending months building a pipeline for recruiting the very best people, but then spend little time actually onboarding them to make sure they are successful.

As you scale, you realize, “Huh, I really need more of these.” And the danger is getting too process-y instead of outlining the objectives so people understand, “Okay, we’re doing this for this reason.” It’s almost like you want to provide more context versus trying to exert more control. Because maybe in a very autocratic, hierarchical, bureaucrat

Yeah, this is actually a pretty systemic mistake that I think very few companies get right, which is how you evolve early employees. Obviously I think that’s a really important thing to do. These people have been with you for a long time. They’re probably extremely talented—if you’ve done well, you usually have very good early employees. A) I think

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

Usually no more than 20% of the funding round will take place as secondary. The venture capitalists may not want to take the risk of buying too much common stock (which lacks the financial and control protections of preferred stock). There are also regulatory limits on the percentage a venture capital fund can invest in secondary versus primary sto

Yeah, I’ve seen that situation actually kill companies. My solution to most board problems is going to be highly unacceptable to the venture community, but we don’t give out permanent board seats. We would never ever give out a board seat that we could not remove. And in AngelList and my company, that’s what I’ve done. The only board seats I’ve giv