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

by Elad Gil

We are in a product cycle business. Which is to say that every product in tech becomes obsolete, and they become obsolete pretty quickly. If all you do is take your current product to market and win the market, and you don’t do anything else—if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product and displace you.

fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel.

The problem is, the early adopters are only ever a small percentage of the overall market. And so a lot of founders, especially technical ones, will convince themselves that the rest of the market behaves like the early adopters, which is to say that the customers will find them. And that’s just not true.

And then obviously Google. Probably an under-told part of the Google story is how M&A built Google. People, I think, don’t even necessarily remember the number of things that Google bought that turned into what you think of today as Google-originated products. As

First of all, raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat. If you do have a moat, the customers will still buy, because they have to. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more. And so number one, it’s just a good way to flesh out that topic and really expose it to sunlight.

“Give me a great product picker and a great architect, and I’ll give you a great product.” —Marc Andreessen

I think network effects are great, but in a sense they’re a little overrated. The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously. Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going. Network effects can create a very strong position, for obvious reasons. But in another sense, it’s a very weak position to be in. Because if it cracks, you just unravel. I always worry when a company thinks the answer is just network effects. How durable are they?

Key components of personal time management include: Delegation. Auditing your calendar regularly. Saying no more often. Realizing your old way of operating will no longer work. Finding time for the things you care about in life.

Esses pontos nao servem apenas paea gestao de tempo para CEOs mas tambem pra todos da empresa

3. Get a formal or informal mentor. Ask a board member, angel, fellow entrepreneur, or executive you trust to mentor you on management and delegation. Alternatively, assemble a set of CEOs whose companies are at the same stage as yours, and meet them regularly for dinner so you can compare notes—you can learn a lot from your peers.

A ideia de comparar notas com pessoas na mesma posicao em outras empresas é algo importante de se fazer com frequencia o side effect positivo é o network

4. Get an executive coach. Most of these are bad (since any random person can dub himself an executive coach without any basis for it). But some are quite good and can help you think through how to increase your effectiveness, including proper delegation.3

A CEO’s energy levels dictate those of the team. You should find time to take vacations and truly be offline—otherwise you will lose energy, burn out, and potentially give up. This means once a year you should take a real one- to two-week vacation, and every quarter you should take a three-day weekend. If you are working every day, I strongly suggest that you start enforcing a personal no-work day at least once a week. Burning out will not help you or your company deal with all the stresses of scaling.

A common trigger of founder burnout is finding yourself working on things that you hate. Some product-centric founders end up having to spend endless hours on managing people, sitting in meetings discussing sales compensation plans, sales pipelines, marketing plans, HR issues, and other items that bore them to tears. Mark Zuckerberg famously delegated big swaths of Facebook to Sheryl Sandberg in order to free up more time to focus on product and strategy.

Nao é questao de nao saber fazer,mas questao de ter sciencia e gostar de fazer. Se.nao gosta e nao quer fazer, acaba fazendo com poica qualidade. Melhor delegar e moniktorar nesses.casos.

I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be one of the pieces I’m describing, to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.” That’s super powerful. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it’s too

Eu achei interessante, ms sera que aqui no Brasil essa abordagem nao soaria um pouco arrogante?

As your company grows, how you communicate information has to evolve, too. Don’t forget as you build these structures and establish a few processes that you need to have new communication approaches. Because not everyone is in the room anymore. What does everyone have to read? Where is all the documentation? Where is the source of truth? How do you use your all-hands meetings? How do you use emails from the leadership team? You have to think about all of that.

I don’t think founding documents should change frequently.

“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win. Picture a bunch of people showing up at some athletic field with random equipment and no rules. People are going to get hurt. You don’t know what you’re playing for, you don’t know how to win, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know what the objectives are.”

Quando temos processos bem definidos e sabemos como medir nosso sucesso,conseguimos ter.visibilidade de futuro

That’s my view: you need planning structures earlier than you think, and they should proceed all the way from the top down.

Nao tem essa de definir processos apenas depois da dor do crescimento, mas como sempre digo: velocidade nao é nada sem controle. temos que ter minimamente um planejamento de.crescimento