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

by Elad Gil

Elad: What do you view as the main signs that somebody isn’t scaling? Shannon: Exhaustion. Tardiness. Showing up at meetings completely late and discombobulated. I always tell people, “If you are having a hard time scaling, the best thing to do is to try to be on time so that you’re hiding it a little bit.” You don’t want it to be this completely obvious thing. I think when people aren’t scaling, they micromanage in an incredible way because they feel like that’s the only thing they can really control. They can also get really tactical, really quickly. It becomes, “Well, I can cross that off my list,” as opposed to, “I’m going to tackle this big, chunky strategic issue.” Those are the things to look for, so when you start to get signals from the team—“This person is micromanaging me. They seem really tired. They’re constantly late. They’re hard to reach.”—those are usually signs that the person is over their skis.