Matan Hazanov on scaling from zero to $1.6 billion: the skills that build a company from scratch don't work at scale. As revenue grew past $30M, he had to replace managers, change leadership styles, and integrate acquired teams. Founders often need to step back.
Someone that could take a business from zero to one doesn't necessarily have the skill set to take it from 1 to 10. Right, right. That is a very different skill set. Very few entrepreneurs can do it. What did you learn about scaling a business through that experience?
First thing I'll say is that Anthony had significant self awareness that it was time to change the talent equation at that stage that he had gotten it to. And he was amazing in the sense that we, the three of us came in working with him and he not like he wanted to delegate, he wanted to have us out of it. He wanted to be free to do the things that he was best at. And so that was a lesson, I would say, for founders that like the ability to kind of free your mind that way was incredible. The second lesson I'll talk about is we had to go from what would have been even though it was 30 million in revenue, it was not a staff count like a SaaS business. It was, there was a lot of operating leverage in this thing. And so as we went to 120 and we acquired a bunch of companies and we're ramming cultures together and so on, there was a massive need to change our management, our people and culture and our leadership styles.
