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

by Elad Gil

The first one is, what are things that only the founder/CEO can do and which are existential to the company? What must they spend time on? One of those is often recruiting additional leaders. Others would be, in most companies, articulating the product vision and setting cultural standards. Figure out what those are, and figure it out quite transparently with the rest of the leadership team. Then do a big self-awareness exercise across that leadership team, in terms of skills, capabilities, past experience, strengths. See if you can deploy the group against your needs and objectives, and be really ruthless about what the CEO and founder has to be involved in. Part of that will be them weighing in on what they want to be involved in versus what they have to be involved in. And ideally, you want that documented, their preferences on how they’d like to be involved and their role description in terms of where they have to be involved. Instead, though, this stuff often goes way too organically and becomes opportunistic. “Oh, we hired this person. They have this background so we’ll have them do this.” You’ve really got to think through it as a group and you’ve got to connect it to the company’s strategy and products.