Some Lessons for Rapid Scale
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
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:
