Startups often make the mistake of hiring a growth team far too soon, said Meta’s chief marketing officer, Alex Schultz.
Schultz, speaking on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published Saturday, said that founders often rush to delegate growth when it should be their top priority. At companies with only a few hundred employees, the entire team should be focused on driving growth — not a specialized unit.
“If you’re in a very small company and you’ve got like 200, 300 people, I would argue you shouldn’t have a growth team,” Schultz said.
“The entire company should be working on growth, and at that point, no, you shouldn’t delegate it away,” he added.
Schultz said growing the business is the CEO’s “single most important job.” Only once a founder’s time is stretched across strategy, new product lines, partnerships, or sales does it make sense to hand growth to a dedicated team.
The shift should happen much later than most startups expect, he said.
“So many companies try and hire a growth team at like 50 employees, and it’s just silly,” he added.
Schultz also said Meta’s growth teams are kept lean. The tech giant runs a central growth team of a few hundred employees to manage core infrastructure like SEO, ad tech optimization, and email systems.
Each product — including Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp — then has its smaller growth team focused on product-specific initiatives, typically fewer than 100 people, Schultz said.
“Across our nearly 100,000 employees, we have less than 1% of the employees in the growth team,” he said.
“You can get a lot done with small, talent-dense teams. Growth is one of those fields where that’s always been true.”
Schultz and Meta did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Founder mode
Schultz’s comments echo a broader debate in Silicon Valley about whether startup leaders should stay hands-on.
The term founder mode was popularized last September by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham, who said Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky inspired it. Graham said that founders were too often working in “manager mode” while running their companies rather than getting involved in the nitty-gritty like they typically do in a company’s early days.
“If I could summarize founder mode in a couple of sentences, it’s about being in the details,” Chesky said of the term in an episode of The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast that aired in October.
“So, that’s really what it means: great leadership is presence, not absence,” he added.
Grindr’s CEO, George Arison, told Business Insider last week that he identifies with the idea of founder mode. Arison said he still uses the app himself to get into the weeds of the product.
“The whole ‘founder mode’ popularity — when I first saw it, I thought, I don’t know how else to function,” he said.
“It’s great that someone gave it a title, but that has been my management style forever,” he added.
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