Scaling From 10 to 10,000

There are tons of books about how to start a company. Plenty of books about how to be a leader/executive in a well-established corporation. But there are very few, if any, books about the crucial stage of taking a company from its post-launch stage to large-scale operations. Once a company has found product-market fit, is growing, has raised a couple rounds of funding, and is ready to scale, where do the founders/executives/employees turn for advice?

The High Growth Handbook, by Elad Gil, is a good answer to that question.

Just out in a good-looking hardcover edition (and also available for Kindle, naturally), this book is quite detailed, very pragmatic, has a ton of practical, hands-on information, and has more in-depth interviews with more amazing founders/entrepreneurs than any one book could be expected to.

The book isn't really meant to be read cover to cover, but rather to serve as a sourcebook or manual for founders (and employees) at companies that are trying to scale. If your company has just raised a Series B, has 50 employees and is growing to 200, and is trying to launch a second major product while expanding to international territories, this book is for you.

Areas covered include:

• The role of the CEO
• How to manage the board
• Recruiting, hiring, and managing talent
• Building and managing an executive team
• Finding the right organizational structure
• Marketing and PR
• Product management
• Mid- and late-stage financing and valuation
• M&A

As a former VP Strategy at Twitter (who joined the company through its acquisition of a company he started), Elad knows of what he speaks. He also spent years at Google, where he started and ran the mobile team early on (and was involved in its crucial acquisition of Android). He was also the first product manager for Google Maps. As he notes in a recent blog post, "I joined Google at around 1500 people and left at 15,000. I sold my first startup, MixerLabs, to Twitter when Twitter was just ~90 people, and left the company at around 1500 employees. " Needless to say that's extremely relevant experience for a lot of companies.

Unlike most business books, this has very little fluff and mostly avoids vague generalizations and broad, useless theories. Instead, the bias is toward specific, actionable advice that CEOs, founders, and managers can actually apply. And by including generously long, in-depth interviews, Elad avoids the egoism of many business book authors, allowing different perspectives (also from incredibly accomplished people) to share the stage. Interviews Elad includes in this book:

• Sam Altman
• Marc Andreessen
• Patrick Collison
• Joelle Emerson
• Aaron Levie
• Mariam Naficy
• Keith Rabois
• Naval Ravikant
• ... and many others.

Disclosure: I helped edit this book, so I'm partial to it, but in the editing process I also naturally read everything in it, and was continually impressed by how substantive and fluff-free it is. Also, I'm not getting any royalties or commissions for touting it. This is a serious handbook, it's worth reading, and that's why I'm recommending it.