While this is true, I think that it's vitally important to be careful not to lose what earned you early success as you scale. Growing your team is going to add

While this is true, I think that it's vitally important to be careful not to lose what earned you early success as you scale. Growing your team is going to add an incredible amount of friction in terms of increased demands on collaboration and communication, and I've worked for many startups that have assumed that the processes that worked well for them as a 10-person startup would continue to function at 100 people. What nearly always ends up happening is that everything grinds to a halt, and often the company ends up moving slower than they did when they were much smaller. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't grow, but you should be careful about it. Some absolute key things to internalize before you grow your team substantially: - Everyone can't have input into every decision anymore. You're going to have to compartmentalize, and trust that product is going to build the right products, and marketing is going to launch the right campaigns. This is doubly true if you're a founder or CEO - your team can scale, but you can't, and at some point you can't be the final say on every little decision anymore. - You need to be thoughtful and deliberate about how departments and teams communicate - "just bug someone in the department on Slack" isn't going to cut it anymore after a certain point. - Whether you want to or not, you're buying into a lot of more traditional roles in a company that you probably thought you were too cool / modern for as a tiny startup. A 100 person company without HR isn't hip and modern, it's a massive risk.