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

by Elad Gil

Since 2004, I’ve participated in nearly every stage of the startup life cycle, as either an operator or an investor. I joined Google somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 employees and left when it was at 15,000, close to four years later. I then started a company, Mixer Labs, that Twitter acquired when Twitter was around 90 people. As a vice president at Twitter, my job was to scale the company from 100 to over 1,000 people. I left two-and-a-half years later, when Twitter hit roughly 1,500 employees, and then stuck around as an advisor to the CEO and COO for another year, by which point the company had reached roughly 2,500 people. At Twitter, I was involved at various times with product, platform, internationalization, user growth, M&A, recruiting, organizational process, culture, and other aspects of scaling. I am also an investor in a number of breakout or high-growth companies: Airbnb, Coinbase, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Stripe, Square, Wish, and others. In some cases I have helped companies in meaningful ways, in others I have been a mere observer along for the ride.