You’re reading this book. But are you sure you want to?
Living through high-growth is highly uncomfortable. And it should be. Founding a startup that scales rapidly is not a common path. If you choose to walk it, you’ll be breathing rarefied air.
We haven’t written Scaling Through Chaos to make the journey easy for you. No one could do that. But what we can do is systematically break down twenty years’ worth of data and insights into how the world’s fastest growing and most successful startups have scaled the mountain, taking the kernel of a crazy idea and turning it into a highly impactful company.
We’ve designed this book and its companion app to be a toolkit for the world’s most ambitious entrepreneurs. We know they—you—are hungry for actionable, evidence-based advice, of the kind you’ll find in the other books in the Index Press series: Rewarding Talent, Destination USA and Destination Europe.
Here, we’re focused on helping you figure out how to find, hire, retain and lead the right people to turn your business into an outlier success. Scaling Through Chaos is packed with original case studies, fresh frameworks and unheard stories about the inner workings of pioneering startups. It’s based on the most extensive research ever performed into the growth of VC-backed businesses—incorporating analysis of 200,000 career profiles at 210 companies, in and beyond the Index portfolio.
What you’ll take from this book depends on the particular challenges you’re confronting. How do you manage hierarchy and process without squashing creativity as you grow? What’s the best way to structure your tech team? How can you make the most of your network without building a monoculture?
There’s no recipe or blueprint for how to innovate. But certain things are tried and tested. What this book gives you is a set of best practices and shortcuts about how to hire people, how to stretch them, how to organize them—all of which helps you achieve scale faster. It relieves you of the mental burden of reinventing the wheel of people management, so you can play with the stuff that demands creativity—things like product, growth and technology. It frees you up to innovate where it matters.
The core message of Scaling Through Chaos is that disorder is the price of transformative progress. Try to stamp it out, and you’ll kill what’s special about your company. The most successful founders accept that discomfort, change and evolution are part of the journey, and that the people who help you get from zero to one aren’t necessarily going to get you over the line at the end. You want to back and support your team, but you also have to value and reward performance over loyalty.
You also need to look ahead, while accepting you’ll always be behind where you want to be. In high-growth, you can never hire and onboard quickly enough to match the demand you’re seeing, and it always feels like you’re filling gaps. Yet you have to get your head above the waterline to be able to look to the next beachhead, the next blocker, the next opportunity that’s 12 months or more down the track.
What you’ll see in this book is that growth is not linear, nor even a hockey-stick. Every single successful company has been through at least one near-death experience. No one goes from strength to strength, and often you need to retrench, regroup, pick yourself up and begin again. The key traits of successful founders are not only brains and brilliance, but also commitment and resilience—waking up every day and giving 200% of themselves, solving impossible problems and starting to see obstacles as learning moments. The best entrepreneurs find ways of getting energy from overcoming difficulty.
Expect to make sacrifices. To scale through chaos, you’ll need to pour your life into your business for at least a decade. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not the only way to be successful in life, business or entrepreneurship. But for those willing to step up, there are immense rewards too. If you choose to ride the rocket, Scaling Through Chaos can help you handle the turbulence.
Martin Mignot, on behalf of Index Ventures
Growth is messy, as any parent can tell you. When organizations grow rapidly, they too become more complex and unpredictable. But often there’s order hiding beneath the turmoil. When you open your eyes, you can find parallel examples of emergent structure and beauty all around us—in nature, art, mathematics and society. With a clarity of purpose and the right people on board, companies can find a dynamic equilibrium that rolls with the chaos but channels it towards success, resilience and creativity, with minimal top-down control.
In 1975, a brilliant young physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum made a startling discovery, after working for 22 hours a day for two solid months. A number kept cropping up in systems that circle around an average state for long periods of time before collapsing into chaos—behavior typical of storms, the stock market and even the human heart during cardiac arrest.
This universal magic number—approximately 4.6692—is now known as the Feigenbaum constant. It describes with uncanny precision the ratio between bifurcations in dynamical systems, and allows us to estimate when they will flip between order and chaos.
Feigenbaum’s constant is one of the defining discoveries in the history of complex systems, helping to account for everything from the shapes of mesmerizing fractal structures like Romanesco broccoli to the growth of human populations. It shows how simple principles can give rise to forms that are at once bewilderingly complex, beautiful and elegant—and how order can exist beneath the appearance of turmoil.