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

by Elad Gil

When companies rapidly start scaling, I’ve observed the following things: First, everyone’s workload increases 2–5X. People are scrambling to plug the holes and end up doing a lot of different things. Second, you start hiring quickly. You think that’s going to solve things but your workload only increases. Because you are doing more not less with more people. You are taking on projects you could not get to. Third, as you onboard new people to fill out the organization and the org reaches some sort of equilibrium, your role and its scope suddenly becomes narrow. And I think this phase is really difficult for early employees especially, who acceded during the exponential growth phase. The people who deal with that—the people who deal with the role definition becoming narrower and more focused and are able to faithfully transition through that—are the ones that grow with the company.