Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #9 - Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman - From Startup to Scaleup

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman discuss the key changes founders should think about as they scale their company. The conversation was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, a private event hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017.

Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. So today's episode is a conversation between Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman. They focus on the key changes founders should think about as they scale their company. This conversation was recorded at the scale-up off site, a private event hosted by YC continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017. Okay, here we go. Thank you all for coming here. Everyone here is an important part of our joint network. This, event started with a kind of a funny set of accidents. First, Sam had this brilliant idea of teaching a startup class at Stanford and getting a bunch of different founders to come and talk about kind of the key elements and, you know, he got this, he got me to give some talk on how to be a great founder, I think. I remember. Was that one. And then I went, wow, that's a really good idea. And part of how innovation, I said, well, you know, start-ups one part, scale-ups the other thing. And so we did a similar class with teaching blitzscaling, which is the theme of a book that I'm working on with Chris Yeh, who's in the audience somewhere.

And so we did a Stanford class as well where we got a bunch of different folks. And then Sam and I started talking about this, and we said, look, actually, in fact, this is not just a kind of a good Stanford topic, but this is actually a good topic for essentially our network and for the businesses. because you really only build something amazing if you hit the scale problem. It's not just a, hey, you invent, right? And then, hey, it's easy after that. We hit the oil and we just pump out the oil.

There's actually, in fact, a lot of innovation, a lot of hard work and a lot of skill and craft that goes into scaling. And if you fail, you fail. And so then Sam called me and said, hey, we should do an event like this and we should start doing this as a regular basis. And I said, oh, that's a great idea. and so here we are.

Here we are. So I thought I would open a little bit with some of the blitzscaling stuff and then we'll just kind of kick back and forth. Great. So, oh, and then the other thing, by the way, actually one other little housekeeping thing, the stage conversation, including the Q&A

is essentially going to be published, right? So it's public, so anticipate that being public. The hallway conversations are private, right? So don't tweet or otherwise publish anything in the hallway conversations unless you have permission from the person you're talking to. So with that, one of the key things that I think is interesting is you say, well, why is it that Silicon Valley produces so much of the technological impact in the world? And, you know, we tend to tell ourselves still classically this kind of startup story of, well, we're inventive and we have venture capital. and we import a ton of talent here, and the venture capital stuff all works.

But actually, in fact, it's the fact that we intersect technology invention with business invention, where that business invention includes such things as network effects, new business models, and so forth. And then in seeing those, we realize that certain of those businesses are super important, and we move really fast to establish that business model. And that's one of the reasons why you'll find that most people,

in the Valley all say network effects as something super important. And one thing that actually, in fact, I think, is a fun hobby, in case any of you would like to do this, is occasionally when I'm feeling impish, I will actually, in fact, ask people,

well, what's network effects? Because a lot of people will use the term and actually don't actually, in fact, know what it is, don't know how to measure it, don't know the different kinds of network effects, don't know, like, network effects in growth, network effects on engagement, network effects and revenue network effects and a bunch of these sorts of things. And yet the reason why we're obsessed with network effects is we know that's the kind of thing that causes us to scale.

Now, and so part of the whole thing is a whole set of different techniques. And I'll go through some of the different blitzscaling areas of kind of hiring. But maybe one of the things we should start with is how you've been scaling YC, actually, because the fellowship and the clouds and the MOOC and everything else, because it's not just that we, we, we, we, we, we, we kind of advise the stuff and practice, you practice this stuff. Well, you know, it gets super recursive because one of the things that we did was start our continuity fund because we realized this problem to scale ourselves.

We realized that if we didn't start a growth fund that could help companies who have had their initial idea start to work, then we weren't going to be able to produce as many impact companies as we can, which is really why we started our own growth stage fund. It invests mostly in YC companies. We sometimes invest in non-YC companies, but the idea was, can we... To scale, we need to do two things. One is fund a lot more companies,

but two is build a practice that in the same way we work with founders to figure out their initial idea teaches them how to scale companies. And so we've tried to build this thing, basically, to scale YC we need to scale companies. And that, I think, has been one of the most important

inventions we've had in the last year. We've also tried to go in the other direction, So right now we're teaching a MOOC, which is kind of the third version of that Stanford class back at Stanford, where we are advising 3,000 startups at once. I think this is probably a world record for a number of startups concurrently advised by one program. And next year we think we can scale that to 10,000. And this is teaching people a lot of the YC experience about how to start a company. And I think this is really important, right, that there are, well, as Reed said,

not everyone knows what network effects are, but our version of the network effect is the bigger we can make our community, the more we can get people feeling loyalty to our community helping each other, that's our network effect. And the thing that I really try to do in terms of scaling YC is make sure we don't have to compete with other firms. You manage you do it very well, but most venture capitalists that have to compete, have a tough time of it, spend a lot of time thinking about it. And we like to be the only people that are sort of, that really matter in our own space. And so for us, scale is an answer to that problem. And the more we can scale, the more founders we can help, the bigger we can make our network.

That's really powerful. We've done a lot of other things around the edges, but the big strategy is very simple. It's having a very big top of the funnel. Get to the most promising new founders at the very start of their career thinking about a startup. Get the best ones of those into our program. build a program with real network effects and then have this continuity fund to help invest in these companies

and teach them to scale. And so one of the key things, I think, to understand about scale is kind of the what got you here won't get you there. And so classically, too much of the advice that's given to entrepreneurs is, like, for example, when you're 20 people

hire your scale executives so that when you're, you know, at thousands and so forth, you have all those people baked and in place. And very rarely are the right people that when you're executives at 20 or 50 are the right people for executives when you're 1,000 or 500. Some of them grow with it, but most often, actually, in fact, you need to trade around. And so part of the thing about thinking about scale the right way is to think about dynamism, to think about the fact that you're refactoring your org as you're going and that you need to be anticipating that you're refactoring your org. You need to be anticipating that, you know, for example, you're looking at your set of feet.

folks, hopefully if you've done it well, you've got a bunch of well-cohesive, strong A-player's, but A-player players at this stage are not necessarily the same as A-playerers in the next stage, and you have to be, one, managing your connectivity with those folks in a way that if you're promising this person that they're going to be head of product or head of sales or head of marketing or head of engineering forever, and that goes away, then when you break, you break them, or you may actually still want them in the org, which you actually want to be promising is things like you will actually have a seriously important role in this organization forever. You will be a major contributor. Your job will increase. You will learn things, but not necessarily

unless you're pretty sure they will be. You will be in charge of this function. And so that changed because when you change the scale of an organization, you're moving from when you're 10, 20 people, you're all doers. A couple of you are managing too, but you're basically all doers. When you move to 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, you move from doers to manager doers to managers and doers to, to, you know, managers of managers, otherwise execs, right? And that's changing the whole dynamic. And so you have to anticipate in scale that you're changing around the way that your company actually works is kind of a key thing. And you need to be anticipating that that will be coming. I had a funny example of this late last year. Someone was writing a story about YC,

and they wrote something about how, you know, we just had our second major reorg in two years. And I read that as, oh, they're saying we're not moving fast enough, and they meant it as way too chaotic. And it's this, and I stand by my read of it. But I think, like, the amount of dynamism that the startups that really scale well have always looks a little chaotic on the outside.

It's just because there's constant shuffling and new people in, people who aren't working out out. The very best founders that we've worked with, one of the things that they always evaluate their people on is how good have they been at training their replacements, how good are they at, you know, on a moment's notice, being able to move to a next role.

Because most founders are very bad at this, and most people are very bad at this. You know, most executives will not do this. There's a story at Facebook at one point that they tied like 50% of executives' bonus to how good of a job they were doing at having replacements ready to go and being ready to move into a new role. And I think if you don't really incentivize it,

you never get enough of that culture in place. And if you're going to be blitzscaling, you're going to just be moving people around and reorganizing constantly. Yep. And part of those two corollaries, which Sam was just illustrating on that dynamism. So one of them is that actually the chaos isn't just external, it's internal. And so tentatively what happens is people complain about the chaos internally, which by the way makes sense, operational efficiency and everything else.

And you have to condition the organization to say, when we're scaling really fast, there will be chaos. We're trying to constantly manage it, but we don't manage to zero chaos until we're actually in a relatively stable place. And so expect that, work collaboratively with each other and make that happen. That's one part of the correlation. So it's not just external looks at chaos, it's internal chaos. It's internal chaos. No, it really is chaotic. And you have to just, like, the wrong way to address that is to, like, say, okay, my team

says they don't want chaos. I'm going to try to manage out all the chaos. Yes. You know, it's okay to have a little bit less, and that's a noble thing to shoot for. But the trade-off, you know, people that run these perfectly non-caotic organizations somehow never build great companies. Yes. So the trade-off is we're going to accept a little bit of chaos in exchange for a shot at one

of these massive great companies. and founders just have to sell that to their teams. It's hard. And it's a management dynamic. Chaos will go up. You do some solidity. Cass will go up. You do some solidity.

It's that dynamic. The second part, and this is one of the really key things that I learned from my first startup. This was kind of a classic entrepreneur mistake. It's called Social Net. I kind of approached this with what you, you know, actually.

I always kind of make vaguely teasing comments of MBAs. This is a classic MBA thing, which is like, oh, hire the people who have the experience of that job, get the CV of it, you know, put that CV in, you know, make that happen. And so I literally had like job description

to history and was optimizing for that. And it's a total fail as you get to scale because the real thing you need is to have the people who learn and who adjust. One part of that is learning and adjusting through what's the needs of the business, what's your product market fit, how is that working? The other parts of the learning and adjusting is the whole organization is going to change shape.

And so if you don't optimize for people who are learners who will go into that, your host. And so this is actually part of when I got to PayPal and was kind of when Peter and Max and I were going on walks about like how to first build what was first called FieldLink, then Confinity, then PayPal. we were doing these walks, and I said, no, no, don't look for, oh, I've got 10 years of experience QA. Look for someone who learns fast. They need to have basic skills, because like learning it from scratch, too difficult. But look for that learning curve and look for team sports and look for other kinds of things. And for those of you who know Peter, you know he was particularly irked at the team sports thing, but later turned out to be right. Libertarian, sorry. That was the individual achievement playing chess as well.

what matters, not being forced. Sorry, I just fried for the same. No, it's an interesting point. My version of this is you want to hire for values first, aptitude, second, and skills third. And I think the problem with most executive recruiters is that they reverse that order. And so if you say I need to hire a CFO,

they will go bring you people with 20 years of experience as a CFO at vaguely similar companies. But unfortunately, it's usually like 20, years of the exact same year of experience over and over again and they probably can't learn and adapt if something really changes. Things are really going to change. If you're trying to scale fast, you really need someone who is aligned with the values of the company so that when things change or when they have to make a decision, they'll make the one you would make if you can't be in there or they will be a good team player and go do that thing. You need someone who has high

aptitude because the role is going to constantly shift. And the speed, the ability, the rate of the rate of improvement dominates skills. And then specific skills experience obviously matter. But for me, it's third on the list. Speaking of YC continuity, Ali, who runs our continuity fund, had never had any venture job before. It has done a fabulous job.

Same thing is true for a lot of the other people that we hire. I think if you free yourself from the sort of the traditional model of how you hire executives in a non-growing, very static company and think that in a blitz scaling company, you have to flip the priority of skills. You end up, or the priority of attributes. You end up with a very different team, but it's the one that works.

And the very best companies take this exceptionally far in how much they're willing to hire a non-traditionally qualified executive. Yes. And actually, I mean, there's a bunch of different parts hacks on this is one of the things that I actually learned from when Sean Parker and Zuckerberg hired Kohler from LinkedIn and you know I was talking to Kohler about this the thing they put them in is they put he's his generalist and they put him in a recruiting role first I was like look this is the most major thing and so we're not hiring a traditional recruiter we're hiring a really

smart generalist and that was actually one of the things that really helps set the initial talent team and culture as it scaled and it was that kind of thing about thinking which are the things that you most need to solve and then getting the generalists into it. Because one of the things that you do need to eventually as you scale a higher specialist, but the theme that you look at as you move from startup to scale up is you always have generalists. The generalists are important for learning, changing the organization, adapting, adapting product market fit, tackling new markets, going global, etc. But you still very selectively add in the specialists. When you have someone who says, look, I am just a, you know,

kind of a network engineer, you're like, okay, great. That's when we know that what we need from you is network engineering for the entire tour of duty, the entire length of time here, and that's fine. The rest of it, you're trying to have generalists as much as possible. And matter of fact, actually another, like part of the, that was a learning from social and another of the person who first did that role, LinkedIn, is in the audience, Lee Hauer, was our first, like, okay, utility player, make sure you can, tackle any problem that we

throw at you. So I'm going to move to culture. We have a great talk from Jason Kailar who will be up after us and is one of the world-class folks on culture. So I don't think we should go

overly in depth, but I think it's worth touching quickly. I recently did, I'm doing this podcast series on Masters of Scale with June Cohen that's coming out. I think it's May 3rd. And it's kind of this heavily edited thing on these different themes of kind of what are the different theories of what it takes to scale.

And I had a conversation with Reed Hastings where, you know, I asked them, I said, look, you know, there's two theories of thought in Silicon Valley. One theory is that culture each strategy, and that culture is the dependent thing for how you really build great companies. And then the other theory is that actually culture is the historical explanation for successful companies, right? That when you have a successful company, you look back and say, you know, that culture, that was really great. And Reed looked at me and said something that I normally say to other people, so this was kind of fun, kind of a funny, embarrassing moment in the,

in the interview, which was, he says, well, both. Like, duh. I was like, yeah, that's right, that's the right answer. Right. It was clever asking the question, but wasn't, wasn't so clever in terms of the answer. But I do think that the thing, the theory that's pro-culture is that that again when you look at the traits of you're going to be moving up at such a fast rate that you're going to be having chaos, you're going to be reorganizing fairly consistently, and as you reorganize, especially managerial roles,

that resets a bunch of patterns and you'll have some chaos in that. How do you keep a high-performant very strong company? And culture is in part the answer to that. Because if your only culture is top-down hierarchy and messaging and communications that comes from the top, that culture won't survive as you really balloon the organization. Instead, you want a horizontal accountability.

You want it so that everybody is keeping everyone else accountable to the culture that we're in. And cultures are not like there is the good culture and the bad culture. Cultures are defined by an organization. Some cultures are engineering cultures. Some cultures are high IQ cultures. Some cultures are collaborative teamwork cultures. there's a different set of things you're emphasizing, and that should be dependent on your organization

and the problem you're solving. The problem is, is it doesn't just end there. You actually do have to play good strategy and everything else. And so the thing that when people frequently sell culture too much, is they say, once you have good culture, everything else follows because you hire the right people, you play the right way together, and that's, of course, extremely important, but if you don't get the business model and the strategy right,

how do you guys teach culture at YC? or what's the particular way that you guys angle on this? You know, I think there are so many different kinds of cultures that can work, and I'm certainly a believer that you have to have, like, a great business and a great culture, and they can be somewhat orthogonal, but also if you put, you know, one business's culture, like if you took, you know, if you take one business's culture and throw it into another successful business, it might be disastrous. So they really do somehow have to fit together.

The general framework that I think about when adding people to a team, which is I think what defines culture, is what is going to be this person's net effect on the output vector of the organization. And there are people who are brilliant and can get a lot of work done themselves and would add to the vector in that sense, but they piss everybody off so much. They have a net negative effect because they make other people less productive. There are people who are moderately intelligent and moderately productive, but have a hugely positive impact. on what they get everybody else to do. And I think, like, one version of culture is, are you good at only bringing in people that have a positive net effect on the output vector,

which screens out sort of just looking at people in a vacuum? I think, though, that it's really easy to sort of use, in Silicon Valley, in the current environment. It's really easy to use culture as an excuse for underperformance. And so you have people say, you know, we drink a lot of green tea, we all go do yoga together, we're super nice to each other, and we have this wonderful culture. And they don't understand why people don't want to come work there or come and leave and aren't productive.

And the answer is the culture that matters, I think, to the best people is one where they can just come and be really productive and be around really other great people. And if you have a culture which looks good on the surface, but somehow rejects super talented people or it's covering up for constant infighting, I think that can be a real problem. I think one of the things going on in the current 2017 Silicon Valley is it's very easy to get entitled employees.

It's very easy to get entitled people at a company. Everyone wants to work exactly how they want. they want to be really rich right now. If the company's not going to get liquid next year, they're going to go somewhere else. We looked once at the average 10-year of employees at companies in San Francisco, and I sort of couldn't believe it had been training down, down,

I couldn't believe it was going to get any lower. And it managed to subsequently get lower. And so, you know, this idea of how important it is to have people that are going to join a company and stay there for five or 10 years sounds like a crazy thing to say, because no one does that anymore. And yet somehow at the best companies, that does still happen.

And I think if you think about what do we have to do to get the best people to stay at our company for five or ten years and then go make it after culture, which one of the things that is included in that is wild success for the company and the mission that people care about, that's really important. But getting people who are there for that and not there for the green tea, which is like, I think, an easy way people

think about culture in the wrong way at the beginning is super important. You need to create an environment where really great people will want to come, work with each other, and not have to deal with the crop that they do at most companies. Just in case anyone's under illusions, although I think very few people here, culture isn't benefits. Culture isn't, you know, food, it isn't kombucha, right? You know, et cetera. Unfortunately, that's what boards tell you when they come, ask you how the culture is going. Yeah. But it's not that. Right? What it is is how are you holding each other accountable to the mission and to the way that you work and to the way that you have high performance? And one of the things that I think is super important for this is actually, in fact, I think two few organizations follow in what Hastings did in terms of creating a culture deck.

Now, the thing that's interesting is that the reason this deck got there, and I actually think every company should do some version of that and some version of publishing, it. The reason Hastings did this is they first started with kind of studying how people bounced out. They interviewed and hired really good people. And then they came in and the people came in and they said, hey, we're not a family. We're not here forever. We're actually a team. And we should basically kind of say, if you have adequate performance, we give you a generous severance package and have you leave and do that immediately. And people say, wait, wait, I thought I was joining a family. And they said, okay, well, let's define what it is. And they wrote it. And it said, well, how do we shape the funnel of people coming in?

Well, it's publish it. And then, of course, after publishing it, it actually really helped a whole bunch of people understand, like, oh, that's that kind of culture, and should I work there? And I really like the fact that they're shaped that way, that that particular way of playing, that particular sports team, that's the sports team that's the right kind of thing for me. And I think many more organizations should actually be much more explicit about that

because they don't talk about like, oh, we have cafeterias, we have a volleyball court. That's not in the culture deck as a way of doing this. The traditional problem, we see a lot of these, you know, value statements and culture decks, and the problem is they're only valuable to the degree they're different from what other companies say. So most of the ones we see,

because we suggest that every company write this out, and it's like, we value integrity. We value being a team player. Be excellent. Be excellent. And so I think, this is a worthwhile exercise and it's good to do,

but only to the extent that what you say is different from what other people would say. And trying to figure that out is really important. And honestly, what most companies find when they do this or what many companies find is that they have nothing to say that wouldn't be in sort of the macro-expanded template of what a good culture is.

And that is often a wake-up call and people go think about that. And when I talk to folks, I'm trying to get them to sharpen the mind is what filter would have A players working at other companies than yours? Which A players do you not want working at your company? And what is that? And that shows you that you begin to have something

that's kind of an edge and a culture and begins to approach to uniqueness. Now, another part of scaling is hiring changes. So classically, in your first 10, 20, 50, 100, 150 people, founders, CEOs, interview everybody. because part of the way that they try to help the culture stay is they say they're doing that check. In fact, you know, Neil Busry, when I was talking to this, I think he and Dave Duffield interviewed everybody up to 500 because they were the final culture interview. They presumed that everyone had done the skills and other kinds of things and they were they, they are you the right fit?

And that's super important. But you're hiring changes as you scale. That the process, again, what got you here doesn't get you there because now you need to start hiring a bunch more people. You need to be trusting people in the rest of your organization to hire well. You need to be systematizing more. Like one thing is you begin to get from the, call it the hundreds into early hundreds into the late hundreds, you'll actually start having onboarding classes.

Like when you, sometimes say, okay, we hire people, and then all 15 people start at the same day so that we train them on our company in the same pattern in order to make that efficient and so forth. And that's part of this whole kind of hiring process, So you also not only have to think about org, but also how you're hiring, what's the way you're doing it, and that that itself is a scalable process, not just from sourcing and from interviewing, but also all the way into integrating.

So that's another way to look at kind of the culture on hiring. One of, I'm going to shift topics to communications within the company. Classically when you're at an early stage, you're all in the same room. easy. Almost like on all hands is we just happen to all be in the same room at the same time and that's the way it works. Then you begin to build and part

of that is that begins to shift to everyone has a complete dialogue to be on the same page and you have to start changing the pattern of which information is being both expected and communicated. And I actually found a Cheryl Sandberg anecdote to be particularly

like it's not exactly the communications pattern but it's the kind of communications pattern that shows you. Like when she started at Google, she celebrated everyone's birthday, like on the day. And so everyone got, oh, this is a really special place because we celebrate each of our birthdays. Well, then you move to a 500-person organization and you're having birthday celebrations, you know, basically every day.

Right. And that begins to get too much and so. And so then they moved to telling birthday celebrations per month. Everyone whose birthday was in April, this is the birthday. celebration and the whole thing and kind of doing that. But then the people at the first part thought, ah, this used to be special. It used to be personal. It used to be kind of closely connected. And now, right, it's not so special anymore. And so that's the kind of thing when you're planning for dynamism. The same thing isn't true in terms of corporate communications.

Because how you as leaders in the organization speak to folks, you're no longer going to be able to talk to everyone. No longer is everyone going to be able to ask you questions. And you need to start figuring out. And also, by the way, there's now a whole bunch of information, certain key risks, executive decisions aren't, not everyone's going to know. And you have to condition to, this is still a great place even as that's changing, and then

also the structure of those communications. And that's actually an important thing about thinking about the change of leadership. I don't know if there's anything on the calm stuff you want to add. Certainly when you get to the stage where people that were used to knowing everything, don't know

everything, that I think more early employees leave over that than anything else. And it's really tough to say what to do about that. It's people that have gone from being sort of absolutely in the inside to not. That leads to a huge amount of turnover. And I think it's worth thinking proactively. Is this someone special enough that I'm going to somehow include them in the executive team? But that is, I don't think people talk about how much of an effect that has on early employees but in my experience, when you really talk to someone about why they're leaving, someone that joined as employee five of a super successful company now as 500 people, that's almost always a huge part of the reason.

And I think sometimes you can address it, sometimes you can't. I have a hack for that because it's important. And actually I hadn't realized, I've actually not spoken about this hack before, I think it's an important thing. When I realized this in early days of LinkedIn, what I did is I arranged a regular lunch with some of those key contributions, in kind of some different lunch groups and just where we had lunch and could talk about the company. So they still felt that they had an inside conversation.

It wouldn't be they'd know everything and I wouldn't sit down and go, okay, I'm going to have a brief few about everything. But there's a conversation about how, like, I'm thinking about the company, what the risks are, what kind of challenge was doing, what are they seeing, what's going on with the culture and so forth? And that actually, I think, gave longer senses of the special thing, even as the organization got a lot bigger. I can't, I'm not 100% sure who told me this. I think it was Brian Chesky. He used to spend or still does spend, like, 20 of his 30 nights a month, taking key Airbnb employees that don't report him out to dinner.

And it's just like, let's talk, I'll tell you about stuff. And he's super open, so he'll talk about a lot. And I think, like, that level of commitment, like, I'm going to take 20 of my 30 nights a month and use it to sort of keep close to early people who otherwise sometimes feel out of the loop is huge. The other thing on communication that people get wrong as you scale, and I'm supposed to go to questions, so I'll make this a short point,

is how much of the time, or how much time you have to spend repeating the same message. So a lot of people want to say, at one all hands once, here's the company's strategy. They assume everyone's going to remember that, and they don't want to keep talking about it. And every nervous laughter of acceptance all throughout the room. You just have to keep doing it. And one of the things that founders will often say to us is, even though they knew that advice, it's like the rule in software,

like no matter how long you think it will take, it's going to take longer. Like, even if you know you're supposed to do this a lot, you won't do it enough. All right. So I'm going to say one very quick thing, and then we're going to go to questions, although we can keep talking if you like, but we have about eight, nine minutes for questions.

The other key thing is to decide when you really, really need to hit the gas because part of what the blitzscaling stuff is you actually deploy capital in a fast and inefficient way in order to get to scale and or global scale. And sometimes that's competition, sometimes that's market opportunity, sometimes that's critical mass, density, and networks. But one of the key things is what are the different judgment points at which you're hitting the accelerator on scale and then trying to anticipate that in good ways? And those tend to be the variables in what you think about it, but that's another thing to think about in the scale So with that,

Let me add one more. Yeah. People are always tempted to do this halfway, and I think, like, you should, that the entire company should be aligned, like, are we in the mode where we are testing,

are we in the mode where we're trying to make things work, and testing growth channels, in which case we can do some things, but we're still going to try to be really efficient, conserve capital, hire reasonably slowly, or are we in the mode where we got things to work and we know what to do,

and we are now going to, like, spend money at an unreasonable rate because there's this time period. And I think it's really dangerous to be in the middle zone and it's also really dangerous to have some people in the company think you're in one or some people think you're in the other. It's a sort of a, it's the subset of this question that if you go around the company

and ask everyone for their top three priorities, almost no company, or to explain the company's mission, almost no company can do that and have everyone say the same thing. But it's like, are we in hyperscale mode or not? it's very rare that one company has a cohesive opinion on that and that they all flip at the same time. Thanks. So you talked about we've got to be prepared for change in chaos as we scale. But what are the key stabilizing elements or the invariance that keep the organization together as you scale?

Well, so one as we mention is culture. Another is the question, generally speaking, changes of mission are really bad, so the mission should also be there. So to some degree, everyone is, we're in service to the mission, not we have this role in a specific organization. And then, generally speaking, changes to strategy are very expensive. They frequently happen, pivots, et cetera. But it tends to be the, this is the investment thesis instead of hypotheses that we're testing out. What tends to not be as much as, is like, okay, this is what the exact org structure is. these are what the exact team structure is. Sometimes your go-to-market may go from, like, for example, if you're an enterprise

business, may change from the, where we're getting our initial customers to we're really scaling out. Sometimes it may be, like, for example, one of the things that LinkedIn did is we're virality, but then we also move to SEO as a component. We add that in a strong thing, and that will change. But those are rare changes in terms of the chaos. I don't know what you... You know, people like winning.

People like the lighting customers. like it if there's just this mass demand of this huge upward draft behind what you're doing. One of the reasons I think why trying to hyper-scale a company that is not that that is not winning fails

is because without that, then all of these problems of people having their turf stepped on and the occasional bad hire you have to get out, people have a lot of time to think about how unhappy those things make them. And if things just keep getting better and there's like more opportunity than you can possibly take on and that everyone constantly has new expanding roles and so they don't get caught up in

these turf wars, then it works. But I think this is one of the reasons it's so important to not flip into hyperscaling mode until you're pretty sure the product is working. Because without this natural updraft of like a market that is desperate for your product and a feeling that like everyone is winning every day and the company is doing just fantastically well, then all of the things that go wrong when you try to blitz scale can break the company. So I think the key thing for me is don't try to do this until you're confident you have this updraft. Yeah, and I think, by the way, there's a slight bit,

there's a slight kind of a softer mod, which is obviously winning, keeps a lot of focus on it, which is really good. The possibility of playing the game to win is really what you must always have. Like if you lose that, things begin to break. just how you stop blitzscaling I feel like financial discipline is such a hallmark of some companies that to give it up for six months, 18 months,

however long it may be, and then to come back to it seems like it might be hard. Brutal, in fact. I mean, it's one of the things where you always have to know that ultimately you have to get to a rational comparable business where you're actually, in fact, working on efficiency. All companies ultimately get back to that in some way. Now, you can have such a guiser of money

that you can have many parts of your company that are not working efficiently. We all see a few of those iconic companies. But generally speaking, you'll need to get back to efficiency. The question is that one of the key things, I think, in both startup and scale up, is solve problems at their time. Don't try to pre-solve them.

It's like the hiring thing. Don't try to hire that scale executive from that giant company, when you're 30 people because that scale executive probably doesn't know what to do in a 30-person organization unless the unique talent Similarly to say we know we're going to need to be operational efficient we know we're going to need to be You know focus on operating margins and how costs work and how scale works and everything else in a capital efficient model But not yet right We'll just be thinking about it like this piece this piece this is how we're fine to it this is how I get to it

But you don't you don't need to start that problem at the very beginning when you're in a blitzscaling circumstance. And it's brutal to change them. Yeah, I think it's important to say, you know, for the leader to say to the company, what you're willing to overpay for and why. So it may be that, you know, it's really important to get to a network effect

or it's really important to sort of, yeah, turn up marketing enough so that you're in enough people's minds because you need people to sort of all at once decide this product is okay, but that's for a short period of time. The one mistake that I think companies really make in this is they decide that they need a lot of people, they can't get them, and so they're going to just double salaries or triple salaries. They're just going to start way overpaying for people.

And that's the one that seems impossible to turn back down in practice. But if you can stay disciplined on that and just say, for a short period of time, we're going to overspend in these areas for this reason because we need to get to scale before the business starts to work, I think you can generally then unwind that or rein it in somewhat, but it's very hard. And frequently, one of the questions that can be in consumer internet, especially, Enterprise needs to identify this earlier than consumer. And consumers sometimes will overly obsess with operating margins early when it's actually, in fact, get to scale, then obsessed with operating margins. Because if you're not at scale, your operating margins don't matter.

So scale first. Now, it's not that you stop thinking about operating margins, but you kind of go, when do we actually affect, take that as one of our primary projects that we're actually working? working on. It's as you get to scale. And by sequencing it out and getting people to know, hey, we will be working on this. We will care about this. It's not that it's irrelevant. We're just not working on it now. Then that can make the brutal change a little easier. Right. That's part of it. All right. Thanks for listening. As always, please remember to rate the show and subscribe on iTunes or however you listen to podcasts. And just a reminder that all of our podcasts also have videos

so you can check those out at YouTube.com slash Y Combinator. Okay. See you next week.