RevenueCat now has more than 150 team members. Around 100 of them are in my org.

This is still a little crazy to me. My own org is now bigger than any company I had worked at before starting RevenueCat. As a technical founder, I always preferred computers over people. Computers are deterministic. People are emotional.

But if you find real PMF, team building becomes unavoidable. You have to build more. You have to move faster. You have to do more things in parallel. And at some point, the company stops being a product that a small group of people can brute force into existence and becomes an organization that needs to keep improving without breaking itself every week.

I have made a lot of mistakes over the last almost 9 years. Some were obvious in hindsight. Some were expensive. A few were probably unavoidable. These are 100 of the lessons I have learned getting to a 100-person org.

  1. Recruiting is a long game. Just because someone says no today does not mean it is a no forever. Build the relationship, leave a good impression, and keep the door open.
  2. Hiring is always a priority, even when you are ahead of the headcount plan. If the company is growing, it is much easier to fall behind than to stay ahead.
  3. External recruiting agencies rarely work. Their incentive is not to find the best fit; it is to close a candidate as fast as possible.
  4. Excellent recruiters are very hard to find. When you do find one, everyone’s life gets a lot easier.
  5. The brand compounds like every other company metric. Candidates who were unreachable a year ago may eventually reply.
  6. Great people attract more great people. Hire enough of them and recruiting starts to get its own kind of virality.
  7. Most people oversell when recruiting. Don’t. The best candidates see through the BS and value honesty about both the good and the bad.
  8. Candidates appreciate knowing the salary and process upfront. It saves time for both sides. Have a compensation philosophy you can explain and defend. People might take a pay cut, but nobody wants an unfair offer.
  9. Focus on candidate experience. Some people will inevitably get upset, but keep improving the process. Magic happens when candidates have a great experience even after being rejected: they re-apply later and even refer friends.
  10. Technical interviews are already stressful. Do not make them more stressful than necessary. Avoid obscure questions, make the interview close to the real job, and encourage collaboration.
  11. If your interview process works, do not bend it under pressure. Consistency and fairness come from sticking to a standard loop.
  12. Spend time looking at recruiting metrics: pass rates, interviewer variance, stage conversion, and close rates. They will help you debug calibration problems.
  13. At a certain scale, when multiple people run the same interview, assign a DRI to calibrate interviewers and review scorecards.
  14. Watch out for interviewers who always grade YES, but never STRONG YES or STRONG NO. Read between the lines. They are probably uncalibrated.
  15. A candidate with several STRONG YESes and one NO is often more interesting than someone with YESes across the board.
  16. Keep an eye on how many interviews your best ICs are doing. It can become distracting and hurt shipping velocity. Constantly train new interviewers through reverse shadowing.
  17. Being desperate for a hire usually turns into lowering the bar. Avoid the temptation.
  18. The flags you see during the interview process almost always show up 10x at work.
  19. Pedigree is a weak substitute for evidence. We all make mistakes when we see shiny resumes, but there are bad people at great companies too.
  20. Watch out for people who have seen scale, but have not done the scaling. They are easy to spot if you ask detailed questions about the problems they faced and how they solved them.
  21. Watch out for repeated short stints. Everyone can get unlucky once or make a bad judgment call. Multiple times is a pattern.
  22. Never skip reference calls. Even with a strong referral, do at least two. I have yet to see a candidate with weak references work out well.
  23. Backchannel references matter even more for executives. You will learn more there than in the interview process. If the references are not stellar, it is probably not worth the risk.
  24. Everyone wants feedback when they are rejected, but be careful with what you share. The reason is usually technical ability, culture fit, or both. A lot of people do not want to hear it.
  25. If they meet the bar, hiring users can be a great hack. They already know the product, including the good and the bad parts, so onboarding is much faster.
  26. Attitude and values alignment matter more than raw technical skill. If the foundations are there and the team is strong, the candidate can grow. A genius who is not aligned with the team is a recipe for disaster.
  27. Always hire pragmatic engineers. Avoid dogmatic ones. We only get to play with computers because we serve customers. Migrating to the trendiest architecture with zero customer impact is a red flag.
  28. Never hire an engineering leader you cannot have a nerdy conversation with. They need to be deeply technical. Do not settle for a therapist or coach.
  29. Everyone wants to work from home, but only a minority of people are disciplined and self-motivated enough to work remotely.
  30. Hire for flexibility, but be flexible too. Understand what motivates people. If they are doing great work and are excited about a different internal role, make room when the fit is real.
  31. You will mislevel candidates. It is okay. Under-leveling is easier to fix than over-leveling. Correct it as soon as it is obvious, and treat it as fixing a hiring mistake, not as a normal promotion.
  32. For every manager you hire, prepare a serious onboarding document: the team, their backgrounds, past reviews, strengths, current problems, and open questions. Then have them write a 30/60/90 plan.
  33. The easiest way to know if a new leader is working is to agree upfront on the success case and failure case in the 30/60/90 plan. The more objective it is, the clearer the decision becomes.
  34. Hiring mistakes do not mean the person sucks. They mean the person is not a fit for the current team. Not acting quickly is unfair to customers and coworkers.
  35. Do a postmortem after every separation, voluntary or involuntary. There is almost always something to learn.
  36. Do not be stingy with severance. You made the hiring mistake. Ultimately, that is on you.
  37. Most executives are full of shit. Many are career-driven status seekers who know how to sell themselves. The job is to find the actual builders, and they are rare.
  38. A great exec will make the company feel brand new. A mediocre one can destroy your culture, and if you are not careful, your company.
  39. Spend time with executive candidates in person. Watch how they think, work, and interact when they cannot perform a polished interview answer.
  40. Management sucks. Be suspicious of people who want to become managers. The best ones usually never wanted to be managers in the first place, but had to do the job and got good at it.
  41. The manager is not expected to do the IC job, but they better be able to do the job and be damn good.
  42. Management is not only managing ICs. It is also managing up. The best managers make fewer surprises happen.
  43. If you have a good team, managers should spend most of their time on delivery and some of their time on people. Sound the alarm if those percentages flip.
  44. Even the best managers need calibration, not just trust. Spend the time with them until they are calibrated. Only then do you get real leverage.
  45. Try to keep a healthy ratio between internal and external managers. Internal managers bring institutional knowledge. External managers bring management reps. Both sides need what the other has.
  46. Tricking people into management by starting them in technical leadership roles has been a useful way for us to scale, especially with established teams.
  47. But the transition from technical leader to actual manager needs to be very intentional. Hiring, org design, and long-term planning do not come naturally to most technical leaders.
  48. Middle managers initially have almost no incentive to terminate anyone. It creates conflict and feels optional. Support them through it. Once they see the team is better off without a bad fit, they start to understand.
  49. When managing managers, do not let them hire someone you would not want to manage yourself.
  50. Never promote someone out of fear or for retention. It almost always backfires.
  51. If every promotion case is obvious to the org, you avoid a lot of unnecessary drama.
  52. If a termination or “not meeting expectations” review is a surprise, it is a total management failure.
  53. A big counteroffer rarely works when someone is already leaving. By then it is too late. It is also unfair and proves the person was probably underpaid before.
  54. The only way to build a great team is to hire people better than you.
  55. Every hire resets the cultural and talent average. Aim to increase talent density, because otherwise it will naturally go down.
  56. B players hire C players. But even A players make hiring mistakes. Correct them quickly or they become a virus in the org.
  57. It only takes one unaligned or bad performer to destroy the motivation and momentum of a full team.
  58. Bad fits are rarely isolated incidents. There are always multiple signs.
  59. Performance issues will eventually become obvious to everyone.
  60. Focus on the middle performers. High performers and low performers are obvious. The people right on the line create the most problems because they are usually acted on too late.
  61. Top performers compare themselves against the very best people in the company. Reassure them when they are doing great work.
  62. On the other hand, underperformers compare themselves to other underperformers. That is how they convince themselves they are doing fine.
  63. The best people can stretch a lot. They often rise to the challenge. But watch their limits before they burn out or become the bottleneck.
  64. People usually do not burn out because of hard work. They burn out because they are doing shitty work or working with shitty people.
  65. Perfectionists can be great, but startups are hard for them. Help them embrace chaos. Things will break. The job is to keep reprioritizing and stop small cracks from becoming big fires.
  66. Even the best people have rough patches. Be empathetic, accommodate, and provide early feedback. But be clear that previous performance is not a guaranteed seat forever.
  67. Real startup people are not just the ones who enjoy the early stage. They are the ones who keep adapting as the company changes.
  68. You cannot build a company for everyone. The earlier you accept that, the more aligned your team will be.
  69. Write the company values down and never stop talking about them.
  70. Early employees shape the culture more than any values doc.
  71. Early employee morale is a good indicator of the state of the culture.
  72. Culture needs policing, even (especially) when things are going well.
  73. Have zero tolerance for illegal behavior and misconduct.
  74. Follow first principles, but remember that one of the best parts of starting a company is building a workplace you would have loved to work at. Do not be afraid to be unique.
  75. Don’t network for the sake of networking. It is mostly bullshit. Build great things instead, and the opportunities to meet and recruit interesting people will show up naturally.
  76. It is harder to run a 20-person org than a 100-person org. Between 20 and 40 people, systems break and communication lines grow exponentially. Fix the systems and org structure so you can keep scaling.
  77. Teams survive being small better than they survive unclear decision-making. Poor performers also have a harder time hiding in smaller teams.
  78. If there is no DRI, do not expect it to get done. Shared ownership usually means no ownership.
  79. Shipping velocity is a cultural advantage, and it almost always improves morale.
  80. If it is important, write it down. Writing is one of the most powerful leadership tools.
  81. Founder osmosis stops working around 50 people. Write things down and overcommunicate.
  82. Transparency in times of crisis pays dividends. Employees want to be treated like adults, and it builds trust. The same applies externally.
  83. Numeric goals are proxies. Missing one is not the end of the world if you learn. But beating the number while ignoring what is broken underneath masks critical issues.
  84. In order to preserve talent density, do light 30/60/90-day performance management for new hires. It forces early feedback and avoids surprises later.
  85. Do not listen to people who say founders should not waste time interviewing. That is bullshit. Hiring is the highest-leverage thing anyone at the company can do.
  86. Founder interviews help in three ways: you meet people you may not work with directly, candidates can ask direct questions, and hiring managers stay accountable. If the founder says no, there was probably a problem earlier in the process.
  87. At a certain seniority, it is not about who plays with computers best. It is about who knows the business and customers best, influences the team, and works autonomously without needing management.
  88. Create a culture where everyone is encouraged to talk to users. The more they hear the pain directly, the better and faster they will build.
  89. Always optimize for simplicity at startups: product, processes, systems, compensation, recruiting, everything. Optimize for simplifiers and avoid complexifiers.
  90. Small teams ship faster. This has always been true, and it is even more obvious in the age of AI. Reduce team size, give teams clear ownership, and have managers spend most of their time with the teams that are struggling.
  91. Praise people who go above and beyond and do things outside their scope. But a side quest should never replace the main quest.
  92. Keep an eye on median tenure, especially during rapid hiring. Sometimes you need to cool down before the team is ready to ingest and onboard more people.
  93. Reorgs are inevitable in a growing startup. Build a culture that understands they are necessary, not automatically negative, so you avoid unnecessary emotional damage.
  94. By the time a reorg is obvious, you are probably late. Re-evaluate the structure at least twice a year.
  95. When doing reorgs, start with an MVP: involve as few people as possible, make as few management changes as possible, and have a clear rollback plan.
  96. If you reach PMF and have built a decent pizza team, you have probably achieved more than most of your advisors. Be open to feedback, but do not let imposter syndrome override your gut. Only truly listen to the people who have actually done it.
  97. Get a real support system: coaches, other founders, people who understand the game. Family and friends can help, but they will never fully understand, and it is unfair to expect them to.
  98. The best way to spend less time managing bad people is to spend a lot more time hiring the right people.
  99. It’s never the smartest team that wins. It’s the one that persists, keeps going, day after day, doing thankless work to build something people want.
  100. Most companies fail. Life is too short to spend years building with people who drain you. Build a team you are inspired to work with and achieve the impossible.