Why Successful Startups Stumble at 40+ Employees- Steve Blank

Last week I got a call from Patrick an ex-student I hadn't heard from for 8 years. He was now the CEO of a company and wanted to talk about what he admitted was a "first world" problem. Over breakfast he got me up to date on his life since school (two non-CEO roles in startups,) but he wanted to talk about his third startup -- the one he and two co-founders had started. "We're at 70 people, and we'll do $40 million in revenue this year and should get to cash flow breakeven this quarter." It sounded like he was living the dream. I was trying to figure out why we were meeting. But then he told me all about the tough decisions, the pivots and how he had to fire his best friend he had to do to get to where he was. He had been through heck and back. "I made it this far," he said, "and my board agreed they'd bet on me to take it to scale. I'm going to double my headcount in the next 3 quarters. The problem is where's the playbook? There were plenty of books for what to do as a startup, and lots of advice of what to do if I was running a large public company, but there's nothing that describes how to deal with the issues of growing a company. I feel like I'm just driving without a roadmap. What should I be reading/doing?"

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