The journey past 100... Hello Scale!

The journey to 100 employees has been an incredible journey... The below, highly validated and extremely scientific image provides a very accurate depiction of getting to scale

But all jokes aside, as a Founder, having grown with the company since its conception, I often feel like I have been involved in building at least four or five different businesses, as each phase of growth has their own identity and set of challenges.

Phase one is typically about “hacking everything together.” There are not a lot of processes, structure or policies and everything is about learning, and fast. At the beginning everything is fresh and exciting, filled with naïve ideas and inaccurate predictions. Decisions are made easily as the team is small and experimentation happens each and everything single day. The foundations of our core values and culture started to emerge and team bonding was important.

The next phase growth, for us at least, become dedicated to finding product market fit. It was the period where we started to have much clearer goals, building for what the customer needed, not just what we thought was cool. The team was still small, but an emerging need structure was becoming more and more important. The dream of remaining “forever flat” was simply not possible.

The phase post-product market fit pushed us to focus on growth and expansion. Being a primarily self-funded startup, the need to have a very accurate understanding of every aspect business was critical. We grew the team strategically and at our own pace, opening offices in Paris, then London. This created a new challenge of managing international teams and trying to ensure our culture remained strong, even if we weren’t all in the same place. We knew that we couldn’t be flat, and a waterfall structure has too slow and hierarchical, so we decided to embark upon an agile transition.

Now we are working hard to consolidate our exec team and our job as Founders, is to ensure we provide the right resources to our growing team. Our model is predictable and scalable, and we strive to serve our customers, while ensuring our culture remains strong. Here’s to the next phase of growth and thanks to all our amazing employees for being a part of this amazing adventure!

Now, at over 100 employees, nearly 150 to be precise... Our focus is growth and expansion internationally and I was asked by Startup Luxembourg to share my story of entering scale (below).