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

by Elad Gil

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.