Source: What I Learned About People Who Scale, Pedro Franceschi (2021)
Illustration by Pietro Soldi
As Brex prepares for 2022, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes for people to scale at fast-growing companies. I shared this essay with our team this week. I hope you find it useful as well!
Is this person going to scale? If you work at a startup, you’ve certainly heard this question before.
The conventional wisdom says that during periods of hypergrowth, a company will outgrow anyone who hasn’t done the job before. But having seen many of our early leaders scaling through the craziest growth phases of Brex, I was never satisfied with this answer.
Failing to scale is not about lack of will. I haven’t heard of someone who got layered at a startup and wasn’t trying as hard as they could to keep up with the job. So is it simply a matter of skill? I don’t think so. Experience definitely helps, but even experienced leaders have to accept that their past experiences are not perfectly translatable to a new startup. Startups are doing things that haven’t been done before, so experience can only be part of the answer.
Perhaps a better way to think about experience is not as how many times you’ve done a job before, but instead how many times you had to change yourself in order to be successful.
Everyone knows that experienced leaders make a big difference. But this small shift in definition helps understand which types of experience are a good predictor of success. It helps explain, for example, why hiring leaders from fast growing companies is a good idea. It’s not just because they’ve done the job before, but because the company was changing rapidly, causing their jobs to also change rapidly, and these people still managed to be successful. Conversely, hiring an exec who spent twelve years at Google will almost certainly be a disaster for an early stage company.
If ability to change is what it takes to scale, a more interesting question, then, is why changing is hard. Imagine you want to change — what do you do? You start by changing your actions. Stop doing what’s not working, and start doing something else. Think of a first-time manager struggling to adapt to the new role. They know what they have to do: stop doing IC work, and start empowering others.
But forcefully trying to change your actions usually doesn’t last very long. The moment you stop paying close attention to each individual action, you come back to auto-pilot mode. In a matter of time, the manager is back at doing IC work — and struggling at their job again.
There’s a better way to change your actions: change the belief system that generates them instead. My job is not to get a task done, but to help my team win. Once this belief is rewritten in the manager’s brain, the right actions will happen naturally. Being a manager becomes a part of your identity, so you start doing manager things. Going back to your old habits is now a violation of your core beliefs.
Reinventing your core beliefs is the silver bullet of scaling. But it is hard, because the same core beliefs you’re trying to replace were also responsible for your success. The new manager was promoted because they were great at getting tasks done. How could they possibly get rid of this belief? They have to let go of a part of who they are. It’s like breaking up with a partner that you had great memories with, but you know you need to part ways to move forward and ultimately be happier. There’s a certain grief involved in reinventing your core beliefs: a part of you has to cease existing for the new to come in.
But different from a traditional death, this one has agency involved. This is what makes scaling so painful. You have to choose to go through this journey, and most people are not ready for this emotional rollercoaster as part of their jobs. But once the death is accepted and the grief period is over, there’s now fertile ground to nurture new core beliefs. A new version of you. Ready to scale.
The journey of scaling doesn’t end here, though. Scaling is not as simple as other changes in life. Even if someone wants to change, we’re actually not good at teaching people how to scale.
In 1908, the marathon world record was 2 hours and 55 minutes. Today, the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon is 3 hours. Thirty thousand people qualify every year. In the course of a century, we understood what makes a good marathon runner, and created a systematic process that allows anyone, even thousands of amateurs, to become good at it. But if you ask someone how to become a better leader, they will tell you to surround yourself with good leaders and learn from them. Imagine asking a friend how to be a better runner, and hearing that you should spend some time with good runners?
It is frustrating, but learning from good leaders is the safest path we know to become a better one. A big part of the reason is because the hardest parts of a leader’s job can’t be learned by reading a book. You have to feel it in order to develop a sense of what great looks like. You can read all day long about how to run a great meeting, but you only understand what it really means by watching a good leader do it.
Picking the right leaders to learn from is an important step. Here, one tempting mistake is to over-index on a hero. It’s easy to pick a mentor, a previous boss or a successful entrepreneur that you admire, and start trying to emulate them. But you don’t need to be a jerk with your team in order to be a great product leader like Steve Jobs was. While heroes are absolutes, role models are domain-specific. It’s important to learn what to learn from whom. [1] There are probably better role models for people management than Steve Jobs.