When a startup finds product-market fit, the next step seems obvious: hire more people, serve more customers, and keep raising the ambition.
There is no shortage of language for this stage. Hypergrowth. Blitzscaling. Crossing the chasm. All of these frameworks describe a version of the same thing: operating the business with more people, more customers, and much higher stakes.
But a company breaks every time you double it. Our job as founders is to see what will break next and fix it while everything is still moving.
I knew scaling would be hard. I didnât understand why until I did it.
Sick days
In the early days, you have a small team. Everybody owns a single problem, and everyone stretches to cover when someone is busy. But what happens when someone takes a sick day, or a long vacation, or something unexpected happens in their personal life?
When youâre a team of 10, one person being out takes 10% of your capacity with them.
As soon as you have a semblance of product-market fit and are beginning to scale, you need to build a bulletproof business.
Just like infrastructure, redundant systems are what deliver best-in-class uptime. Having two people in a role is meaningful, and it feels damn good to know that one person being out wonât stop your sales team from taking new customer calls.
Companies are complex beasts. The number of functions inside a business means you have to grow quickly to get both clear separation of responsibilities and redundancy.
Teams
As more people join, you have to organize them into teams. Teams foster collaboration, give clear ownership and swim lanes, and let individuals have a 1+1=3 moment.
Teams also create tribalism. Itâs much easier to throw something over the wall once thereâs a wall.
Building good teams with clear ownership that can sustain 100% quarter-over-quarter headcount growth is hard, especially when those teams have conflicting priorities.
Leaders
Teams need leaders. And best-in-class executive hiring only has a 60% hit rate.
I used to think that when VCs evaluated startup hiring, they were looking at the individual contributors you could attract. In the early stages, thatâs true.
But as you enter the growth stage, great hiring shows up in the leaders you bring into the organization. These are the people who steward the teams, settle the differences, and set things up for success when a bandwidth-constrained founder can no longer play referee across two parts of the business.
This is something that has to come from experience. I keep telling founders who are early in their careers that experience is extremely, extremely underrated. Itâs natural for young founders to write it off, because they donât have any. But leading great teams isnât something you can be taught. You learn it by burning your hand a dozen times, watching things go wrong, and feeling the pain of decisions that slow an organization down.
Culture
Once teams are defined and leaders are in place, itâs easy to become disconnected from the culture. There are now layers between the founder and the individuals.
For a company to be best in class, the organization has to row in the same direction, and thatâs only possible with clarity from the founder on how the company should operate. The most important job a founder has is internal and external communication.
At this stage, decisions start getting made when the founder isnât in the room. Thatâs why the founder has to imbue the organization with a cultural framework that produces the right decisions without them.
Evolution
As companies grow, the people who joined earliest get frustrated by how differently the company operates. This is natural.
Companies have to reinvent themselves as the bigger opportunity comes into focus, and that reinvention is jarring. Itâs rare that you nail the company values in year one. Itâs far more important to re-evaluate what the company prioritizes as the organization gets larger and the strategy develops.
More importantly, you have to cut the behaviors that are limiting the team. Things that worked when you were 10 people will not work when youâre 100, and people are attached to their behaviors. Behavioral change is hard, especially when the incentives change underneath it. When different parts of the org have different priorities and goals, unifying them behind the mission becomes the most important work you do.
I think about organizations the same way I think about product. They change with the market. Being able to shape them thoughtfully, with the constraints you have and the direction you want to go, means you can craft the day-to-day experience of everyone who works on your team.
Scale
Well-functioning organizations are underrated. Great markets can hide organizational growing pains, but great markets attract competition.
The ability to scale a team, multiply its output as new people join, and hold onto the values you set out to build creates a force thatâs hard to compete with.
A company that can grow quickly without losing its urgency, focus, or quality has built something a competitor cannot copy overnight.
And if you can build a 1,000-person organization that still moves with clarity and purpose, you are almost impossible to stop.