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

by Elad Gil

Org structure is often about tie-breaking Reporting chains are ultimately about decision-making. For example, there is a natural tension between engineering and product management, so where do you want most decisions to be taken if the two groups disagree? The person who both functions report to ultimately functions as the tie-breaker between the orgs. This is a good heuristic to keep in mind when thinking about org structure.

Hire executives for the next 12–18 months, not eternity As an exhausted founder/CEO, the temptation is to try to hire an executive for a role who will last for the remaining history of the company. This leads to over-hiring, or hiring someone who will likely be ineffectual at your current scale. For example, you do not need a VP engineering who has run a 10,000-person organization when you only have 20 engineers. Instead, hire someone who has led a 50- to 100-person team and can scale up your org to the right level over the next 12–18 months. Either that person will grow with the team or you will need to hire someone new in the future. Ben Horowitz has a good perspective on this in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Of course, if the executives you hire do grow with the company, all the better; a stable management team is a big positive for a company. Even if the executive team evolves only slightly over time, though, you should realize that your org structure may still change more rapidly.