Your clarifications help, thanks. > I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I jus

Your clarifications help, thanks. > I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that. Yes, if you're not at product/market fit, then as a business getting to product/market fit is probably the most important thing. However, people problems always crop up when you have people involved, and your people problems will be largely uncorrelated to whether the business has product/market fit. (It's not likely that you will have fewer people problems because the business doesn't have PMF). The article could probably be made more clear that this isn't a 'list of things to do after you're successful', it's more a 'common failure patterns we see in companies with headcount > X'. And of course, there's the unstated advice, which is 'try to avoid having large headcount until after PMF'.