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

by Elad Gil

There is an optimal growth rate that is unique to each company. It depends on the physics of the operations: What is the pace of hiring that’s required to service their initial customer versus expanding to the next market segment? How complex are the logistics in delivering the services? What is the capital intensity required to diversify? Those questions start to become paramount in figuring out a growth plan that makes sense. Good founders have done it. They’ve remained fiscally prudent. But a lot of companies have tried to do too much and diversify too much because lot of capital was available for cheap, but then they often had had difficulty raising money or growing into their valuations because they just couldn’t maintain focus on the unit economics.