Blippar's co-founder realized her skills were perfect for the startup-to-scale-up phase but that she became a bottleneck at scale. Her inability to delegate meant others were better suited to lead the scaled team. This self-awareness is crucial for founders to prevent stalling growth and empower their organization.
Related Insights
Traits like extreme responsiveness, which earn praise early in a career, can lead to burnout and poor prioritization at senior levels. Leaders must recognize when a once-beneficial belief no longer serves their new, scaled responsibilities and becomes a limiting factor.
Many entrepreneurs love their core business but lose motivation as their role expands to include responsibilities they dislike (e.g., finance, operations). The solution is to reinvest early profits into hiring employees to handle these tasks, freeing the founder to focus on their strengths and passions.
As companies grow from 30 to 200 people, they naturally become slower. A CEO's critical role is to rebuild the company's operating model, deliberately balancing bottom-up culture with top-down strategic planning to regain speed and ensure everyone is aligned.
Before hiring for a critical function like growth marketing, Gamma's CEO spent 6-12 months doing the job himself. This immersion taught him what "great" looks like, preventing a bad hire and ensuring he could properly lead the function he was delegating.
When rebuilding ZICO, the founder realized his first mistake was a relentless focus on speed. His new approach prioritizes building to last, embracing his own leadership limitations by delegating, and fostering a culture of emotional transparency to create a more resilient business.
A founder's role is constantly changing—from individual contributor to manager to culture builder. Success requires being self-aware enough to recognize you're always in a new, unfamiliar role you're not yet good at. Sticking to the old job you mastered is a primary cause of failure to scale.
Founder-led selling is essential for the first 6-12 months but becomes a critical growth bottleneck if it continues. Founders who can't let go create a self-fulfilling prophecy where the business can't scale beyond them. They must be coached to transition from being the primary seller to an enabler of the sales team.
Bumble's founder believes the initial, all-consuming obsession is critical for getting a startup off the ground. However, this same intensity becomes a liability as the company matures. Leaders must evolve and create distance to gain the perspective needed for long-term growth and to avoid stifling opportunity.
As a creative business scales, its operational needs and existing structure can start dictating strategy, stifling the original vision. Founders must actively resist this inertia to avoid simply servicing the machine they've built.