Some Lessons for Rapid Scale

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For the first time in a while, I'm seeing companies that are genuinely scaling as rapidly as Google and Facebook did. And it's real scale, with revenue and growth numbers behind it, not just hiring without substance. 

So, this song goes out to all my friends out there who are inside those companies (cough cough OpenAI cough cough)... It’s a mildly disorganized rant, but hopefully, it’s helpful to some of you!

The best and worst part of scaling companies is that everything changes all the time. 

Simply put, your job is to get good at change. At some point at Facebook, I just stopped unpacking boxes when we moved. We moved desks SO MANY TIMES. And eventually, I lost the boxes entirely. That is a GREAT metaphor for the rate of change inside scaling companies, but also the fact that you need to learn how to get zen about the change. In fact, you need to anticipate it: stop packing boxes — in fact, don't bring shit with you to put on your desk. 

You know what humans are bad at? Change. Our brains are wired for stability and security. Rapid scale tests every part of you as a human and requires a unique set of skills.

10+ years ago, I worked with First Round on an article — Give Away Your Legos — that was an attempt to share my most important lessons from experiencing such rapid scale at Google and Facebook. Someone once asked me to summarize the Legos article in one sentence. I’ll give you two: 

1) Your job is to make yourself irrelevant. When you are inside of a company that is rapidly scaling — I’m talking 3-10x/year type of scale — the only thing you can be certain of is that what you are doing today, whatever is working, will NOT work tomorrow. What got you here won’t get you there. That applies to systems, processes, and people. The most powerful skill you can learn is to work yourself out of a job as regularly and rapidly as you can. It sounds so scary! But the nature of rapid scale is that you regularly get new buckets of Legos dumped on your head. You think you have it under control and suddenly someone backs up a dump truck full of Legos… Learning to make yourself irrelevant makes the difference between the people who drown under the Legos and the people who can play with all the fun new Legos that keep showing up. At the craziest part of Facebook, I found myself working my way out of a job every 3 weeks. I was constantly searching for people who could do what I was currently doing so I could create space and capacity for whatever was coming next. Making yourself irrelevant means:

• Hire people who are better than you, the kind who intimidate you. You want folks on your team that you can learn from. These are the kind of people that trigger your imposter syndrome and mean that you are regularly thinking “why are these people working for me??” I’ll tell you why they’re working for you — you are the best person to onboard them, you are the best person to protect them, and you are the best person to set them up for success. You don’t need to be managing them in 1 year, you just need to set them up to take your job and then be ready to move on to whatever is next. Your goal is to hire people who can do your job better than you so you can be ready for whatever new project will show up.

• Hire a bench — a team of leaders that can handle 2-3x your current scale — so you ALWAYS know who would take your job if you got hit by a bus. If you do not have an answer to this question — who would take your job — you are behind on hiring. One of the most important “scans” you can do as a leader of a team is where your time is being “sucked” — what area is making you have to do IC work? Where are you constantly having to get deeply involved or fix things? Anything that is dragging you down into the muck is a sign of either a leader that is missing or one that is failing. To handle rapid scale, you need a team (not just one) of strong leaders that can handle anything and you yourself need to feel “ahead”.

• Buy or build a solution that is “too big” for your current stage. Claire Hughes Johnson has a great story about buying Workday when Stripe was hundreds of employees and getting a lot of resistance that it was too “big” of a piece of software for their size. She ended up saving them a lot of money and time versus having to implement something and then rip it out and replace it with Workday. 

• Seek boredom. This sounds insane, but the minute you’re bored is the minute you know that you can take on more. Seeking boredom means hiring / scaling yourself out of a job so you have the capacity to take on more. You don’t want to be the person that your boss or the CEO is thinking — “well, I would give them more but they don’t have capacity / their team isn’t strong enough.”

2) Don’t worry, it’s all going to be ok. Rapid scale is an insane rollercoaster. It is really really easy to get eaten alive by the constant monster attacks — feelings that will try to make you feel like you don’t belong, like everyone is trying to replace you, etc. Part of getting good at change is realizing that a lot of this shit doesn't matter. It is SO EASY to get swept up in the emotional turmoil of the org changes, or leadership changes, or job splitting, or layering, or new hires that seem like they might take your job, or people who everybody thinks are awesome that you think are terrible. Let me tell you... being part of that emotional turmoil and riding the rollercoaster will just exhaust you. The more you engage, the shorter your lifespan at the company will be because you will burn yourself out.

I will tell you that I spent a LOT of time at Facebook being super pissed that I wasn’t a Director. Pissed pissed pissed. I felt undervalued and overlooked and all those things. When they finally promoted me, I felt annoyed because it felt too late. You want to know what no one has EVER asked me since I left Facebook? What my title was. It turns out that all that matters is that I was part of a generational company and, I would argue, one of the best-run companies to go through a rapid scale. What matters to everything I’ve done since is what I got to learn and experience, not my title or any of the superficial shit that can really drag on our emotions. 

Learn to let go and zoom out. What matters is that the company WINS. If the company wins, every single one of you will look brilliant (and hopefully make lots of $). What matters is that you have the most INTERESTING journey where you LEARN the most -- not your title or whether you are "in the room" or any of that stuff. What matters is the story you will tell in 5 years, not what happens this month or even this year. ZOOM OUT.

Here’s 5 things I wish I’d known before starting by journey with rapid scale: 

1) The only thing you will take with you other than what you learn and experience is PEOPLE. Make time to make friends. Real friends. I know you’re stressed and there is so much to do BUT have coffee with people (virtual is fine too!) and get to know them as humans, not just as work robots. And then stay in touch with them after you leave. People from these companies go on to do such interesting things — you never know who you will want to follow, work for, or hire in the future. To that point: Don’t be an asshole — you WILL regret it. Sincerely my only work regrets are when I was a shithead to people at Facebook while I was burning out. I mostly regret it because I just wasn’t acting like a version of myself that I was proud of. But also, please realize that you never know who people will become and the only guarantee is that the power structure will change. Do not optimize too much for the power or hierarchy as it stands today. Tomorrow, it will be different, and if you’re a dick to people that have less power than you, it will bite you in the ass.

2) Be useful. Your north star in your work should always be: I want to be the person that every single person wants to work with again. You want to be the first person that people want to bring on to the new project or the first person they think of to help solve hard problems. If you are the most useful person in the room, you will always get asked to do the most fun, weird, interesting things and that is 90% of the fun of rapid scale — you can get hired to do stuff you are wildly unqualified for... 

3) When it feels political, put your head down and make everyone else look good. Do not engage, do not try to win, just be the person that keeps stuff moving forward and give away the credit. I know this is counter to many people’s advice — they’ll tell you to fight — but having done this AND given it as advice to a bunch of folks in political situations, I can tell you it is the right thing to do. In GOOD companies, the political people ALWAYS blow themselves up. Let them. It can take a little time but wait and see. You don’t have to be part of the politics or the dogfight or whatever is going on. You can make the presentation and let someone else present it. You can do the work and make everyone else look good, and eventually, everyone will know that you’re the reason why things are working. The absolute WORST political phase I was part of at Facebook was a terrible six months (so terrible), and it was followed by me getting the highest performance rating in the company. Put your head down and do great work, and the rest will sort itself out. 

4) Collect experiences. I know it’s tempting to try to optimize for being the GRAND POOBAH of whatever, but rapidly scaling companies are a completely unique opportunity to do a whole bunch of different things. You can collect 5 different experiences and leave being qualified to do things that you DEFINITELY were not qualified to do when you walked in the door. I started in Communications at Facebook, and because I was willing to say YES to a few weird requests — “come help me figure out how to make our values scale” “come help me build a mobile phone” “come be my chief of staff” — I worked in Comms, HR, Recruiting, Mobile, Partnerships, and Product. I ended up qualified to become a COO. Imagine if I had just stayed in Comms or HR... Sometimes, I wish I had been more intentional about it — consciously collecting experiences that gave me different skills and perspectives — but mostly, I could never have dreamed up those opportunities, so it was powerful to just be useful and then say yes when I was offered opportunities that sounded fun to me. 

5) Manage your energy like it’s 12 marathons back to back. This is a huge regret of mine. I burned out at Facebook because I was consistently working 20-hour days, and I just used all my energy up. There was a lot that went into my burnout, but I genuinely believe that it cut multiple years off of my lifespan at that company. When I recognized the burnout, it was simply too late — I just couldn’t imagine staying. Mark offered me such cool jobs and I was just so tired. The only way I could recover was to leave. DON’T DO THIS TO YOURSELF. Think of it as a marathon followed by an ironman followed by a swim across the English Channel followed by a... you get the point. Take vacations where you are NOT online. Shut your laptop in the evenings (at least some of them). Don’t work on Saturdays. Everyone has a different version of work/life balance, but you gotta figure out how you refill your tank and make time for it. You think that short-term tradeoffs are worth it, but trust me, they are mostly NOT. 

If you are inside a rapidly scaling company, the only thing I can GUARANTEE you is that NOTHING will be the same in 1 year. Your title, what you own, what your department does, who the execs are, who you work for, what the company knows about itself, what its priorities are, etc. So if you are looking for stability or certainty, there it is. Everything is about change. Your job is to change and grow as fast as you can — to try to keep up and stay on top of the bubble. Let go of your legos. In fact, throw them at other people and run away to go find other, more fun piles to work on. Learn as much as you can. Have fascinating stories to tell and things to teach people when you leave. THAT is how you make the most out of scale.