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

by Elad Gil

One of the things that’s most frustrating for a startup is that it will sometimes have a better product but get beaten by a company that has a better distribution channel. In the history of the tech industry, that’s actually been a more common pattern.

every market has early adopters. There are early adopters for everything, and it’s kind of amazing that that’s the case.

And a lot of product/market fit is the fit with the early adopters.

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.

In the consumer world, it’s not true because people have plenty of existing things they can spend their time on. They have to be convinced to try the next new thing.

I think the distribution moats end up being at least as important.

that might be an enterprise sales team for a SaaS company, or it might be the growth team at a consumer company.

One interesting question I have is: Would you rather have another two years’ lead on product, or a two years’ lead on having a state-of-the-art growth effort? I think the answer for a lot of consumer products is actually that you’d rather have the growth effort.

The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more.

And then number two, companies that charge more can better fund both their distribution efforts and their ongoing R&D efforts. Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster.

For each role you should write a job description that explains what the role will do, and what experience and background you are looking for. You can also the list the things you are not looking for, or consider less important.

For each candidate for a given role, ask the same or similar interview questions. This will allow you to calibrate candidates across identical questions.

As each person finishes their interview, it is good for them to enter feedback about the candidate before talking to other interviewers. This avoids people biasing each other and forces each interviewer to take a written stance on a candidate.

Every company I have ever worked for, or with, has realized that one of the biggest determinants of candidate conversion is how quickly you interview them and how quickly you can make an offer.

One excellent resource for this is Joelle Emerson’s Paradigm Strategy website, whose focus is diverse hiring practices.

Here are some simple ideas your office manager or head of people can try as you onboard new people.

Send out a welcome letter

Welcome package

Make sure they have real ownership

Set goals