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

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

What do you view as the main signs that somebody isn’t scaling? Shannon: Exhaustion. Tardiness. Showing up at meetings completely late and discombobulated. I always tell people, “If you are having a hard time scaling, the best thing to do is to try to be on time so that you’re hiding it a little bit.” You don’t want it to be this completely obvious

The reason you’re hiring a new CEO is because there are new skill sets that are critically important. But if someone doesn’t have the founder’s mindset, they’ll be fundamentally, at best, in asset management. They’ll make sure that things keep running, keep going on a trajectory. But the ability to change the curve means taking a risk that a founde

I think there are three big categories. Once there’s product/market fit, then the main thing becomes taking the market—which is to say, figuring out how to get the product to the entire market, how to get dominant market share; because most tech markets tend to end up with one company with most of the market share. And that company tends to be all

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.

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

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).

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.

The other big missing variable in all of this is pricing. I’ve talked in public about this before. What I don’t hear from companies is, “Oh, we don’t think we have a moat.” What I hear from companies is, “Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.” I

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