What is the hardest part of scaling a startup team?

“Look, there's a lot of things, but I think scaling really comes down to, I guess, having a good team. And I think getting— you can just go out and get another 20 people to join your team and expect, you know, go from 20 to 40 and you double your output. But I think That's not necessarily the case. So it's the biggest challenge at the moment is just how to scale a team and in making sure that everyone is working effectively and at their best versions of themselves. So as you grow, we've quickly learned that it's not just one person managing the code base or managing a design system, it's multiple people. So we're at this fun stage right now, or challenging stage of like how we can start to build in systems to scale with the people that we've got. And I think once, or we are close to, it's not far, but getting that moving in the right direction, I think will unlock a lot more opportunities for us to take on more product opportunities. And I think for us as founders and leaders, we've got to get really good at building a good base for the first 20 people. So then when we do decide to scale, we know we've set the base right. So if anyone else joining on, we've kind of given that the right— create the right foundation of a culture and a team. So that's obviously the biggest challenge when it comes to scaling. And then obviously there's going to be new entrants and there's also going to be incumbents. So two types of competition that will eventually come in and obviously play in this space. It's not like I follow them directly, but you just got to be conscious of what's going on so you are not you're making the right move. So yeah, just got to be aware of what happens there and yeah, but just really continue to focus on building the best product experience that we can.”

“So, so what— here's, here's what I say, that it's, it's a great point, right? It's, it's, it's not impossible. I just think it's harder. I just think it's much harder. That's all. Maybe I'll put another example to sort of like throw this out there, just sort of growing and scaling and whatnot, where you have a pool of 3 companies, which is like not nothing. It's actually pretty impressive, but it's still limited when you think about the overall ecosystem, right? And when you think about sort of like the investor base, when you think about the scaling. So there's analogy I use all the time is sort of like there's 3 stages of companies. Stage 1, which is commando phase. Stage 2, which is the infantry phase, which is a scaling phase, right? Post-product market fit scaling phase. And sort of like phase 3, which is sort of like the IBM, HP, Google phase, right? Like the policeman, police person phase. And so they're very, very different. And so when you look at the size of these companies where it's like, okay, great. It's not just evaluation, but even the size of the companies where if you look at how many folks have like, like someone like me, I've worked at a bunch of like, you know, 30, you know, 20, 30,000 person companies, right? Like there's lots of us. Yeah. And so you see a lot of people who are able to sort of take these different sort of like scales, work at different scales. There's so many of these folks in New York and in LA and San Francisco. There's not that many in Europe and there's not that many in Australia. So that pool of being able to sort of like scale is very, very limited.”