How Successful Founders Scale Their Teams From 0 to 1,000
In Conversation with Index Ventures' Martin Mignot & Dominic Jacquesson
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Tuesday, I publish “Insights” to digest the most relevant startup research & reports, and every Thursday, I publish “Essays” that cover hands-on insights about data-driven innovation & AI in VC. Follow along to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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The ambition with our “Insights Synthesis” format is to find the most interesting startup research, digest key takeaways, and deliver it to the right audience. When Index Ventures Partner Martin Mignot reached out and shared their new “Scaling Through Chaos” research, it was an obvious fit for this format.
Together with Dominic Jacquesson, Index’s VP of Insight & Talent, we jumped on a call to discuss the backstory of this new project, their most interesting findings, methodological aspects, and a lot more.
The Backstory of Scaling Through Chaos
MM: “Our team has been creating content for entrepreneurs for more than six years via ‘Index Press’, aiming to answer the most frequently asked questions by founders with data instead of just anecdotes. Following our ‘Rewarding Talent Compensation Benchmark’, the ‘Destination US’ and the ‘Destination Europe’ guides, ‘Scaling Through Chaos’ is the fourth major resource of this format.”
Target Audience
DJ: “Early-stage entrepreneurs as well as people and finance leaders in later stages.”
AR: How can readers best benefit from your research?
DJ: “The philosophy of Index Press is to open source our research for the benefit of the ecosystem. This is why we published the book online as well as in print, and have made our data available through the dynamic Team Plan app for everyone to slice and dice the sample to come as close to their individual situation as possible. To avoid too much noise, however, we introduced a minimum sample size of seven companies.”
Major Takeaways
MM: “What you’ll take from this book depends on the particular challenges you’re confronting:
How do you manage hierarchy and process without squashing creativity as you grow?
What’s the best way to structure your tech team?
How can you make the most of your network without building a monoculture?
There’s no recipe or blueprint for how to innovate. But certain things are tried and tested. What this book gives you is a set of best practices and shortcuts about how to hire people, how to stretch them, how to organize them—all of which helps you achieve scale faster.
It relieves you of the mental burden of reinventing the wheel of people management, so you can play with the stuff that demands creativity—things like product, growth and technology. It frees you up to innovate where it matters.
The core message of Scaling Through Chaos is that disorder is the price of transformative progress. Try to stamp it out, and you’ll kill what’s special about your company.
The most successful founders accept that discomfort, change and evolution are part of the journey, and that the people who help you get from zero to one aren’t necessarily going to get you over the line at the end. You want to back and support your team, but you also have to value and reward performance over loyalty.
You also need to look ahead, while accepting you’ll always be behind where you want to be. In high-growth, you can never hire and onboard quickly enough to match the demand you’re seeing, and it always feels like you’re filling gaps. Yet you have to get your head above the waterline to be able to look to the next beachhead, the next blocker, the next opportunity that’s 12 months or more down the track.
What you’ll see in this book is that growth is not linear, nor even a hockey-stick. Every single successful company has been through at least one near-death experience. No one goes from strength to strength, and often you need to retrench, regroup, pick yourself up and begin again.
The key traits of successful founders are not only brains and brilliance, but also commitment and resilience—waking up every day and giving 200% of themselves, solving impossible problems and starting to see obstacles as learning moments. The best entrepreneurs find ways of getting energy from overcoming difficulty.”