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

by Elad Gil

Send a welcome letter to the new employee—and cc all the teams that person will be working with closely.

We’ve also worked with companies that call this “culture add.” “Who’s going to bring what we most need?” rather than “Who fits in with what we already have?”

The issue with hiring engineers into early-stage companies today is not that there’s a shortage of engineers, it’s that there’s a surplus of founders. And so you have to basically treat them more like founders, because there’s opportunity cost for these early engineers who could go start a company, join YC, whatever.

For example, at $1 billion market cap, a $10 million acquisition is just 1% of your startup’s equity. If the acquisition can increase your valuation by just 10%, then it is clearly ROI positive. By the time your company is worth $5 billion to $10 billion or more, M&A can become a central part of your overall company strategy.

Build relationships with founders of the top five social apps on mobile and the web. Set up quarterly 1:1s for Zuck to meet with the CEOs of WhatsApp, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Weibo. Determine when to pull the trigger and make a bid on each.

for me, there’s this notion of the empathetic entrepreneur who understands their customers’ needs deeply, figures out what’s the responsible way to serve them, and makes sure that is represented in their MVP, even if it comes at the expense of some growth.