Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire
(acquired by Google in 2012)

A: There were so many. In particular, our desire to stay ‘flat’. We hated anything that had any slight smell of bureaucracy or ‘large company-ness’. But [we learnt] when you’re growing at that rate you need leadership. We kept the organisation too flat. When we did need leaders we promoted people, leaving capability gaps.

Our sales organisation was a good example of this. We needed managers to support our sales people, so we promoted some of our best salespeople. This worked well for the most part. Except we lacked the depth for active salespeople to move into managerial roles. We saw a drop in sales for a few months until we got a handle on that.

The other learning was around the things that you think suck. Your employees want performance management and to get regular reviews. You think they suck, but they matter to your employees. [We made mistakes with] the some of the things that relate to hiring and developing your employees. Along with firing them at the right time!