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

by Elad Gil

I would take more of a micro-view of it. Which is: Okay, how many great product pickers do you have, people who can actually conceptualize new products? And then how many great architects do you have, who can actually build it? Sometimes, by the way, those are the same person. Sometimes it’s a solo act. And sometimes that’s the founder. As you scale, you need more of those people. But I always think it’s a matter of, okay, how many of those people do you have or can you go get? Or, back to acquisition, how many of those can you acquire? And then basically that’s the number of products you can be working on. You organize R&D around that, in my view. You want to have a relatively flat R&D structure. You basically want to have autonomous teams, where each team is guaranteed to have a great product person and a great architect. And that’s the model. This is why I always ask people, okay, let’s just do an inventory of how many of those people you think you have. And even at really, really big companies, it’s not a large number. Even at giant companies there might be ten or twenty of each, maybe. And then you build the rest of the engineering organization around those people, including all the rest of the stuff that you do for recruiting and onboarding and all that other stuff. But at the core of it, who do you actually have who can conceptualize new products, and who do you actually have who can build it? If it’s the founder, fair enough. But you need to construct the organizat...