Short transcript excerpt from Jason M. Lemkin advising founders and VPs on scaling: the key bottleneck is hiring managers better than you. He stresses limits on direct reports (≈8 AEs, ≈10 SDRs), the need for mid-level directors, and warns against only promoting internal juniors or hiring non-threatening staff, which prevents scaling.
The numbers go up going from say 3 million in ARR to 6 million ARR in a year is hard enough but then you've got to go to 12 and 24 and 48 and goodness those numbers just get bigger and bigger and the number one mistake I see is not hiring managers that are better than you. You can't as a VP when you come as a versivity you can hire 8 maybe 10 maybe even 12 people yourself and make it and maybe you can take a few of those top five folks on your team those those junior ICs and promote them to managers so that you can get some scale because really you can really only manage about 8 AES per person and maybe 10 SDRs that's about max so you're going to need directors under you mid level management to scale in sales and other functional areas and what I see again and again is only internal promotions and only hiring junior people that are not threats to stretch VPs. You'll never scale. You'll never scale. Have you.
