Learn more about teamwork with this collection
Ways to improve productivity
Strategies for reducing stress
Tips for managing email overload
Checklist for founders eyeing rapid growth
- Write down the qualities you want your company to embody.
- Write down your vision — what you’re doing in the world.
- Communicate these things again and again, all the time. You can’t overcommunicate these ideas.
- Focus on hiring quality people rather than speed. Don’t lower your bar because you need to grow faster. It will come back to bite you.
- Fire people. Just do it!
- Hire amazing leaders as early as you can and help them grow their capabilities as the company grows.
- Prioritize principles over process.
- Keep giving away your Legos! And tell everyone around you to do the same. It’s going to be okay.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
A week ago, someone might have told you they hate their Legos and want to get rid of them. But as soon as you hire someone else, they suddenly want to hang on to all of them.
MOLLY GRAHAM
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110 reads
Give away your Legos
In a startup, if you want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.
At a scaling startup, giving away responsibility is the only way to move on to building bigger and better things.
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961 reads
50 to 200 Employees
If you want your team or company to have certain values, to care about certain things, to act in certain ways, the time to do it is in these first 200 people — or the first 100 if possible. After that, a lot of other stuff takes hold.
Hiring is a network effect. The first 100 people...
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72 reads
High performers in startups
People who are successful at fast-growing companies:
- Are able to adapt to the chaos and uncertainty of adding new people
- Redefine their jobs on a regular basis (every 3-6 months)
- Accept the uncomfortable emotions that come when teams double in a short period of time
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If you want to be one of these type of people who started at Facebook at 25 people and ended up running a huge department, you have to get really good at giving away your Legos. If you hold on to answering customer support queries yourself or writing all the blog posts yourself, you’re never ...
MOLLY GRAHAM
29
93 reads
Advice to leaders
- Help people understand it's normal to feel anxious or scared. This is what they should expect during rapid growth.
- Encourage them to ride their emotions out and postpone acting on their emotions when new people come aboard.
- Set up 1:1s after a month to see how eveyone is hand...
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30 to 50 Employees
This is where everything gets hard and you go from being a family to being a company.
This stage is about developing the right principles. Write down your mission, values and philosophies. Make it clear who you are and how you do things.
Talk about those thing...
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82 reads
200 to 750 Employees
Whatever your company looks like at this stage is how it will be when you're older and bigger.
After 200 employees, any shift in culture requires a lot of work from all leaders within the company. However, when you see a trend over time that you don’t like, you need to aggressively ...
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Find a bigger Lego tower
Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more.
This is an opportunity to find a new job — a bigger and better Lego tower to build. It's more about shifting t...
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- Write down 3 existing company goals impacted by the decision;
- Write down at least 3 realistic alternatives;
- Write down the most important information you are missing;
- Write down the impact your decision wi...
Undefined values can lead to compounding culture debt
When a company is small, the high degree of interaction between team members allows for efficient decisions without having values defined. But as a company starts to grow, communication and alignment around decision-making and hiring become increasingly challenging. Delegating responsibility beco...
Tips For Paying Yourself First
- Prioritize your 2 to 3 non-negotiables in the morning, what you can do on your own.
- Do stuff you love doing and what makes you relaxed, and define them clearly.
- Write it down on your to-do list as an important item to check off every day.
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