High Growth Handbook

"If the high-growth stage at your company feels chaotic, terrifying and stressful, don't worry. That's how it feels for everyone the first time."

— Elad Gil

Gil started Google's mobile team and took part in three acquisitions, among them that of the Android team. He then founded Mixer Labs, which Twitter bought, where he was VP of corporate strategy during its fastest-growth phase. Today he is one of Silicon Valley's most recognized investors, with early stakes in Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and Pinterest. He wrote the book because there is almost no practical advice on how to scale a company from 10 or 20 employees to thousands, and complemented it with interviews with Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison and Claire Hughes Johnson, among others.

The lessons about you as CEO are the first the book addresses:

• The demands on the CEO grow faster than the company. You have to delegate on purpose: if weeks after handing over an area you're still doing most of the work, you didn't delegate.
• Audit your calendar every week at the start and remove what doesn't require you: first interviews, many internal meetings, external meetings with no purpose.
• What made you successful as a founder may not be what the company needs. With 50 or 500 engineers, coding is probably no longer your best contribution.
• Take real vacations. Your energy sets your team's energy.

On the leadership team, the book recommends:

• Hire executives for the scale you'll have in 12 to 18 months, not today's and not five years out. A team of 10 engineers that will reach 30 doesn't need someone who ran 1,500.
• Look for six traits: functional experience, ability to build a team, collegiality, communication, owner mentality and strategic thinking.
• Before searching, talk to people who do that job well at other companies and write the profile so every interviewer is looking for the same thing.
• You will get it wrong once or twice. Several successful companies replaced their first leadership team, and Facebook did so before Sheryl Sandberg arrived. Correct fast.

On the organization and the early employees:

• In hypergrowth the structure changes every 6 to 12 months. Twitter went from about 90 to 1,500 people in under three years. Plan for that horizon and explain to the team that reorganizations are normal and a sign of success.
• Every structure involves trade-offs, and sometimes two options are equally good. Sometimes an area is assigned to whoever has the time and capacity, even if it isn't their specialty, and reassigned when the right executive arrives.
• Some early employees grow with the company and are very valuable; others resist every change, feel left out of decisions and escalate everything to the founders. If you catch yourself looking for a place where someone can do little damage, it's almost always time to part ways, gracefully.

The book also covers the board of directors, late-stage rounds, secondary sales of shares, IPOs and acquisitions, always in tactical-advice format.

The concept to master is organizational pragmatism. Gil insists there is no right answer forever: every structure, every executive and every process is designed for the next 12 to 18 months. The useful question isn't what the ideal organization is, but what the company needs for its next stage and who can hold it together until it gets there.

How to apply it? Open your calendar for the last two weeks and mark each meeting with one of three letters: E if only you could be there, D if it could be delegated and N if it shouldn't have existed. Cancel or delegate all the D's and N's for next week, and use that time to think about the structure your company will need a year from now.

As a founder it will serve as a reference manual for each stage of growth: you open it at the relevant chapter when you're about to hire your first outside executive, reorganize or raise a big round.