9

Scaling your G&A team

Don’t undervalue G&A teams

Once upon a time, people in G&A roles (Finance, HR and Legal) were lumped together as being “risk-averse”—the folks who slow things down by saying no. Thankfully both perception and reality are now changing. That largely reflects a deeper talent pool across G&A functions, including thousands of respected executives who have built their careers in high-growth companies. These executives embody a mindset of being collaborative and constructive.

When hiring G&A leaders into highgrowth companies, you need to carefully assess candidates’ risk appetite, their willingness to make decisions with imperfect information, and whether they can navigate challenges in a spirit of partnership rather than saying ‘no’. This requires time to unpack, but it’s essential.

Yunah Lee, Chief Operating and Finance Officer, GOAT Group

G&A functions are crucial to success. The two ingredients you need to keep scaling are financial capital and human capital. Finance and People/ Talent teams give you the capabilities you need to access and deploy these resources. Meanwhile, legal teams ensure that you navigate a safe path to growth. Risks multiply with complexity, and tech companies are increasingly under regulatory scrutiny.

G&A functions collectively make up 14–15% of headcount as you scale from 50 people through to 1,000, with relatively minor differences between business models:

G&A TEAMS GROW IN LINE WITH TOTAL COMPANY HEADCOUNT (%) G&A TEAMS GROW IN LINE WITH TOTAL COMPANY HEADCOUNT (%)

Adopt a business partnering approach

You build functional teams as you scale: Engineering, Sales, Marketing, etc. However, certain functions involve skill sets which are required to directly support other functional teams. This is most evident with G&A functions. In People and Finance functions, the concept of shared services is well established in larger companies— “business partners” work closely (including co-location) with specific functional areas, becoming highly integrated members. The most common ones are HRBPs and Finance Managers. These business partners are typically aligned with Technical, GTM, or Operations teams.

In software companies, your first business partner role is most likely to be an HRBP for your technical team, as this represents such a large proportion of headcount. A similar business partnering model may extend to legal support, for example, an in-house legal counsel focused on commercial contracting, working exclusively with the sales team.

Systems and procedures around these G&A functions need to be consistent and tightly enforced, given the compliance and risk management elements to these functions. Therefore, we strongly advise that business partners retain a primary reporting line and accountability to their corresponding G&A leadership. The functional leaders that they work with are internal clients.

A similar pressure for embedded support always emerges at scale for design and analytics functions as companies grow. We discussed alternative models for organizing these teams in Chapter 8.

People and Talent

Given that this handbook is centered on themes of people and hiring, we’ve already discussed the capabilities, processes and systems that are required from your People teams (see Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6). We also discussed the initial focus on founder-led recruiting, followed by hiring your first internal recruiter. This section will therefore exclusively focus on how the size, composition and leadership of your People and Talent teams evolves with scale.

As your headcount grows, the balance between talent acquisition (Recruiting) and talent retention (People/HR) shifts. In high-growth through to 1,000 headcount, recruiting will continue to take up more than 50% of headcount and resources across the overall People team, but the need for increasingly sophisticated and robust People processes and structures will build too.

We already support 35% of F500, and the market is still there. The simple priority for our continued success is to keep recruiting and retaining the best talent.

Assaf Rappaport, CEO & Co-Founder, Wiz

“Right-size” your Talent team

Hiring is a fundamental constraint to business growth, so scaling your Talent team is necessary for success. Up to 125 headcount, your Talent leader will be closely involved with all the hires you make, and close to the individual recruiters they’re working with. That means they can plan overall hiring capacity without a formal model. But with further growth, Talent team scaling will shift toward a capacity planning model, prepared annually alongside budgets, and reviewed by month or quarter on a rolling basis:

Demand

  • New hire plan by function
  • Expected attrition by function
  • Adjusted according to internal promotions and mobility to shift towards more junior hires
  • Scoring each hire according to difficulty to fulfill, for example: easy, average, hard. This might reflect seniority, newness of role, or familiarity with the region/country involved:
    | These scores might translate into recruiting effort required (e.g. easy = 0.5, average = 1, hard = 2), and also into time-to-hire assumptions.

Capacity

  • Current recruiters with individual quarterly capacity, which depends on their seniority (either hires per quarter, or points-based capacity)
  • Shortfall or excess between hiring plan and capacity
  • Recruiting team size requirement, incorporating the time required to hire and ramp-up new team members (minimum three, but up to six months)
  • Use of contract or agency recruiters to provide flex, especially if the hiring plan is uncertain
A typical recruiter capacity framework assumes five technical hires per quarter, or eight to 10 GTM or G&A hires. This is independent of source: referrals, inbound, or outbound. But these figures also reflect your brand strength. How hard do you have to work to source and engage top candidates?

Suzy Hathaway, Recruiting Director, Hashicorp

At scale, the organization of your recruitment team mirrors your sales team in a few key ways. In 2021, our team included functional and geographic recruiters, sourcers and recruiting operations. Over the past few years, we’ve built out a complementary enablement function to provide training, learning and development, and best practices for our recruiting team and our hiring managers.

Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer, Figma

Your Talent leader should sanity-check the hiring plan emerging from the budget, to ensure that it’s deliverable. For example, a common error is for function leaders to front-load their hiring plans at the start of the year, when this is unrealistic from a hiring perspective and needs to be smoothed out.

In an ideal world, nobody wants to rely on contract recruiters. The ramp-time makes them less productive, and they can’t build as close a relationship with teams. But in an uncertain macro environment, you need to balance a core in-house team with some use of contractors.

Suzy Hathaway, Recruiting Director, Hashicorp

Within this overall model, recruiters will tend to take a “business partnering” approach, aligned with particular business areas as you scale. The first such hire is almost always a technical recruiter, since these are the most difficult roles to fill. Technical recruiters will have a strong focus on sourcing, which means going beyond LinkedIn searches (although these are still necessary) to identify and engage with relevant talent through more specialized channels and communities. The priority is to become more efficient at presenting great candidates to the technical teams than the alternative model, where technical teams do this themselves or rely on agencies to do so. For more junior candidates, technical recruiters will often also do a firstscreen interview with candidates, focusing on values-fit and getting them excited about the opportunity.

With further scale, you’re likely to add specialist GTM and G&A/Operations recruiting business partners to your Talent team. These individuals need to work closely with the HRBPs and hiring managers in the corresponding teams. They’ll also input into workforce planning. For example, in GTM they will align team hiring with revenue budgeting, working with the CRO and Sales Ops lead.

Once you have “full cycle recruiters” in each of these core functions, you can also scale your Talent team through horizontal specialization. This optimizes your hiring engine with separate coordinators (also known as schedulers), and sourcers.

  • Coordinators: Schedule candidate interviews to keep them moving swiftly through your process. They also schedule debrief sessions, and execute on closing processes: drawing up contracts, taking references, letdown communication to unsuccessful finalists, etc. One coordinator might support four or five recruiters, improving their efficiency as well as enhancing overall candidate experience.

    In our earlier growth stages at Datadog, we sent handwritten letters to rejected finalists. When you’re unknown, candidate experience is critical for building a talent brand.

    Kira Busman, Index Ventures (Former Recruiting Lead at Datadog)

  • Sourcers: Research and map potential candidates, either for individual reqs (i. e. hiring briefs), or to proactively build pipeline across a range of roles (or geographies) that are likely to be needed in the months ahead. As suggested above, sourcers are usually most impactful for technical roles in the first instance.

This structure also provides an internal career pathway for your Talent team, from scheduler to sourcer to recruiter.

Startups sometimes only hire seasoned recruiters as they scale. But you need a balance.

Suzy Hathaway, Recruiting Director, Hashicorp

Career progression for recruiters involves working on trickier and more senior positions. Experienced recruiters will know what questions to ask hiring managers (taking a brief well), when to push back, and how to pitch effectively to top candidates. You should also broaden their exposure to hiring for different types of roles, which gives you more flexibility in your TA team.

There’s a risk of not providing career progression opportunities for exceptional IC recruiters. They are worth their weight in gold, but often they aren’t offered opportunities for role enrichment or leverage, outside of management routes. This is a major oversight, as they can be 10 × value-creators, akin to 10 × engineers.

Alex Duell, VP People (former), Cutover

Another specialist role within larger recruiting teams is in recruitment operations (Rec Ops). Similar to Sales Ops, Rec Ops is about ensuring that you have the right distribution of recruiters across your team, the right ATS tooling, and data integrity, and are therefore able to track hiring progress and generate analytics to optimize your recruiting engine. We recommend hiring someone to oversee both Rec Ops and broader people analytics, at between 500–700 total headcount.

To be data-driven, having someone in Rec Ops is super important. The right analytics allow you to educate the organization about recruiting challenges and priorities.

Kira Busman, Index Ventures (Former Recruiting Lead at Datadog)

To build a scalable recruiting engine, you want a balanced team between pure recruiting professionals, and others with management potential who are drawn to mentoring people earlier in their careers, or to leading the talent-related projects and programs that we discussed in Chapter 4, such as referral programs and graduate recruiting. Talent leaders need to balance the immediate demands of fulfilling the hiring plan against working on these various project areas to make sure they’re having the highest possible impact.

Eventually a Chief People Officer should be at the helm of your Talent team, overseeing both recruiting and HR. Before that point, companies in high-growth sometimes elect to keep these functions separate, with both leads reporting to the CEO (or possibly the COO). The choice reflects the particular capabilities of your existing HR and Talent leads, and of your own capacity and focus as the CEO.

When I started at Figma in a talent acquisition role, I reported directly to Dylan [Figma’s CEO & co-founder]. The intention of this decision was to build relationships with other executives who would be key collaborators. I worked closely every day with Marie, our VP of People, including multiple interfacing projects, such as compensation and offers, leveling and DEI initiatives. The exposure to Marie, Dylan and our bench of executives gave me the skill set to navigate multiple teams with ease, and I believe was critical to my future success.

Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer, Figma

Recruiting metrics also evolve with scale, with the top ones typically including:

  • Hiring versus plan (still the primary KPI)
  • Time-to-hire
  • Candidate experience
  • Hiring manager feedback
  • Funnel metrics—time and conversion per stage, through to offer acceptance rate
  • Diversity metrics through funnel
  • Source of candidates, and conversion to hires
  • Cost-to-hire
You can identify significant inefficiencies by digging into your hiring metrics. In particular, bottlenecks at the final stages of the process, such as close rates, can be quite costly and fixing them should be prioritized.

Surabhi Gupta, SVP Engineering (former), Robinhood

Build your People team

Your very first People (as opposed to Recruiting) hire is most likely to come during the 51–125 headcount stage. By 50 headcount, 47% of the highly successful companies we analyzed had made an HR/People hire, rising to 89% by 125 headcount. We recommend this first hire being either a people ops specialist with four to seven years of experience, or a Head of People. If you already have a Head of Talent who has proven their potential to grow into a Head of People, the people ops hire can fall under them.

The level of HR leadership depends on the strength of your managers. If you have a lot of new and inexperienced managers, you’ll need a more senior HR leader.

Albert Alabau, Chief People Officer (former), TravelPerk and Typeform

My first executive hire was an experienced VP People, Karsten Vagner, introduced to me by Sequoia when we were about 70 headcount and our growth was just moving into overdrive. As a solo founder, he really helped me as a strategic partner, to build out the rest of my executive team, and also around organization design.

Kate Ryder, CEO & Founder, Maven

If you’re planning to hire a Head of People, here’s our recommended profile:

  • Someone with seven to 10 years of relevant experience
  • Able to execute a basic company HR plan as directed by the CEO
  • Able to assemble and oversee a small team to deliver the HR plan
  • About 75% operationally hands-on, with 25% coaching and long-range planning
  • Ideally with a strong recruiting background originally, but since extended to include broader HR experience. They can therefore take responsibility for the combined Talent and People function
  • Alternatively, if you already have a strong Head of Talent, you can focus on an HR purist and leave the functions separate (but collaborating closely) for now
There are pretty distinct camps of people who succeed in talent acquisition versus HR. Some folks are able to broaden from TA to HR, and these are the most valuable for high-growth startups. Almost nobody from HR wants to move into TA!

Alex Duell, VP People (former), Cutover

The most pressing people issues at this point in your journey are likely to be transactional or administrative, for example:

  • Onboarding
  • Payroll and taxes
  • Immigration and visas
  • Remote worker and contractor administration
  • HRIS basic implementation and usage
  • Employee grievance and disciplinary issues
  • Compensation reviews

Until you have a Head of People in place, avoid over stretching, and don’t grow your People team any further. With a Head of People, the team can then scale through the addition of both generalists and specialists. Initially, you’ll probably hire generalists with mid-level experience (four to seven years), but ideally with a T-shaped spike in a particular area such as learning and development (L&D) or performance management. This will give your Head of People the capacity to design and deliver “MVPs” for each core People process, appropriate to your scale and as detailed in Chapter 5. It may also make sense to work with third-party specialist contractors or vendors to accelerate progress.

As well as HRBPs we discussed earlier in this chapter, at later stages of scaling, you’ll also bring in HR specialists aligned with core People processes:

MEDIAN HEADCOUNT FOR INTRODUCING SPECIALIST ROLES INTO PEOPLE TEAM MEDIAN HEADCOUNT FOR INTRODUCING SPECIALIST ROLES INTO PEOPLE TEAM
Our early office manager did projects with marketing, design, and then HR, which they loved, eventually becoming our L&D lead.

Lindsay Grenawalt, Chief People Officer, Cockroach Labs

Our analysis of the overall size of People teams (excluding recruiting) yields an average ratio of 1:50, which stays fairly consistent as total company headcount grows. Internationally distributed and fully remote teams tend to need relatively larger People teams due to the complexities arising from local compliance and internal communication.

RATIO OF PEOPLE TEAM HEADCOUNT: TOTAL HEADCOUNT RATIO OF PEOPLE TEAM HEADCOUNT: TOTAL HEADCOUNT
I was too hesitant and slow in setting up a well functioning global People team. There were so many cultural differences between the UK, Portugal, US, Brazil, China, etc. I stepped too softly and was too hands-off. It’s much better to go in and be confident about the structure and processes you want to implement to avoid losing time.

Sian Keane, Chief People Officer, Farfetch

Step-up your People leadership

The decision to hire your first executive in the people function is driven by the need for:

  • Expanded range, sophistication and velocity of People processes
  • A credible peer to advise and coach your slate of increasingly senior functional leaders on people issues
  • Strategic leadership across both the Talent and People teams
  • Orchestration and involvement across senior and executive searches, building towards a balanced and complete leadership team
PEOPLE TEAM LEADERSHIP BY HEADCOUNT STAGE (%) PEOPLE TEAM LEADERSHIP BY HEADCOUNT STAGE (%)

We generally recommend hiring a people executive by the time you have reached 250 headcount. Where founders haven’t done this, they generally regret it. This hire might be at a VP or CXO level, depending on existing team capabilities, growth rate, and overall organizational complexity.

Our recommended profile for a VP People (hat-tip to Ross Seychell):

  • Hire by 250 headcount
  • Nine to 15 years of relevant experience
  • Able to co-create the people plan with the CEO including medium-term goals
  • Confidence to prepare and present people plans to the board
  • Can shape overall workforce and commercial planning, in collaboration with other senior leaders
  • Reasonable understanding of several key People processes, including compensation and L&D
  • 50% operationally hands-on, 50% coaching and long range planning
  • Can design, implement, and drive decision making through people analytics and metrics
  • Actively involved in senior hiring decisions at the director level, and inputs into executive hiring decisions

Our recommended profile for a Chief People Officer:

  • Hire between 250 and 500 headcount. While this is sooner than the data provided above indicates, most founders we speak to regret not having made this hire earlier
  • 12+ years of relevant experience
  • Often also responsible for global facilities and administration teams
  • As much a challenger as a collaborator, holding other executives to account for the creation and implementation of their people plans
  • Can significantly change the company’s trajectory through the processes they put in place and the interventions they make
  • Drives long-range people vision and strategy, aligned to overall commercial plans
  • 25% operationally hands-on, 75% coaching and long-range planning
  • Strong relationships with board members
  • Able to lead the RemCo
  • Becomes a trusted coach/advisor to the CEO and other executives, building overall team trust
  • Actively involved in strategic leadership decisions

Executives in people roles have the joint shortest median tenure of all functional executives—less than 2.5 years for both Chief People Officers and VP People executives. We put this down to three factors:

  • Emotionally draining and lonely—People leadership involves dealing directly with the thorniest and most emotionally sensitive issues in any business. This takes its toll
  • Founder alignment—People leadership is about embracing the company’s values, and translating them operationally into a culture that feels right. The need for deep personal alignment with you as the founder is therefore greater than for any other executive role. Given that these are emotional as much as rational choices, any differences of opinion are magnified
  • Talent pool—There are still not many proven People leaders with high-growth experience who combine compassion with a commercial focus. When you add the need for close founder alignment, compromises often become necessary
More frequently than for any other executive role, internal candidates from another area of the business can work well as people executives. They are already halfway to success if they’ve demonstrated strong People leadership and built internal trust and respect, particularly with the founder.

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, Index Ventures

Finance

Post-PMF (or Series A), you need to tighten your approach to capital allocation and cash flow forecasting. Your investors will expect clear and regular financial reporting, and your burn rate will be growing rapidly as you expand your team and GTM activity. At this point, you’ll want to hire a finance generalist—someone with sufficient financial accounting skills to oversee your external accountant, but who also views finance as a source of data to support decision-making. This person might be a Controller (six to 10 years experience), or alternatively a Director of Finance (eight to 12 years). They could be a qualified accountant, or alternatively have an investment banking or consulting background.

We hired a sophisticated finance manager with 10 years experience as an employee early on, rather than going cheap. Particularly because we’re a marketplace, with complex accounting plus car delivery logistics. He has scaled to become our VP of Finance (Series C).

Tom Leathes, CEO & Co-Founder, Motorway

If you make a senior finance hire at this stage of growth, they’ll probably need a junior to support them on the more basic elements, particularly if you have significant operational intensity (e.g. vD2C E-commerce with early traction or crossborder activity).

FINANCE TEAM MEMBERS BY 50 HEADCOUNT FINANCE TEAM MEMBERS BY 50 HEADCOUNT

As you scale, find a CFO

Once you’ve unlocked GTM-fit, the operational workload will increase for your finance team. You’ll need to hire a more junior accountant to get through all the work, as well as a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) hire to help build your financial model and apply it to guide your decision-making. Further hires will be focused on each of these areas. For example, you might need dedicated resources to track sales commissions, or accounts payable/accounts receivable (AP/AR) and tax reporting for marketplace transactions. In each of these hires, however, emphasize quality over quantity—over-hiring in terms of experience and caliber, especially if you’re growing really fast. You’ll have roles for them to grow into over time, and this approach will give you a deeper, stronger bench in the interim.

Your Finance lead (Manager or Director) should have been able to scale successfully up to this point. Some may have proven themselves capable of stepping into a VP Finance-level role. But more often, it becomes necessary to look outside the company to hire either a CFO or VP Finance. This is partially to engage with external investors (existing and prospective), who will expect a credible and strategic finance leader they can interrogate concerning your numbers. It’s also to free up the time of other executives from overly detailed planning. This person will also ensure that you have a solid counterweight to collaborate with, and challenge, other executives (e.g. CRO, CMO). For example, there’s a temptation for revenue leaders to cut corners in order to hit short term targets: overly aggressive discounting or giving away too much in order to get commercial contracts over the line. Your finance executive is there to protect the long-term interests of the business.

FINANCE TEAM LEADERSHIP BY COMPANY HEADCOUNT STAGE (%) FINANCE TEAM LEADERSHIP BY COMPANY HEADCOUNT STAGE (%)

CFOs in high-growth companies tend to come from one of two backgrounds:

  • Qualified accountants who have worked their way up from Controller to Director to VP Finance. They bring rigor and a detailed understanding of financial control and compliance/risk
  • Financial professionals with a background in investment banking (CFA), private equity, or consulting (MBAs), who tend to be particularly strong at FP&A and strategic finance

Either of these backgrounds can work, all the way through to IPO-readiness. You need to assess that accountants have a sufficiently strategic and commercial outlook to have credibility with investors, and to support the growth ambitions of the business. Conversely, financial professionals need to be operational enough to maintain robust oversight of finance processes, even if they mostly rely upon a solid Controller and FP&A lead.

Where a VP Finance is about staying on top of the details to give you peace of mind, a CFO needs the ability to distill this down to the most critical ‘1-2-3’ and communicate this to you, your Board and the rest of your executive team.

Yunah Lee, Chief Operating and Financial Officer, GOAT Group

A key area where your finance executive should bring more rigor is around planning, budgeting and forecasting. Planning processes differ a lot between companies, and even between functions. It often depends upon whether you’ve got analytically-oriented functional leads who like to do it themselves, or specialists who would rather work with a framework and guidance from Finance. Regardless, having a finance executive will allow you to step-up the rigor of the workforce planning processes we discussed in Chapter 5 and Chapter 7, providing more confidence with investment decisions and scenario planning.

The CFO needs to avoid being seen as the policeman wielding a stick, either criticizing or saying no. They should be driving ambition alongside the other executives.

Huw Slater, CFO (Former), TravelPerk and Typeform

It’s so different to be a CFO at a growthstage company than a finance leader at a corporation. You need to fix things and define metrics. The mindset and priorities are completely different if you’re in FP&A at Google.

Nina Achadjian, Index Ventures

Ultimately, your finance leader will roll up all planning activity into a single model that drives financial budgeting and modeling (balance sheet and P&L, as well as cash flow). This model will become increasingly sophisticated over time, incorporating real-time KPIs to facilitate “whatif” and sensitivity analyses.

CFOs now are really digging into deeply understanding gross margins and customer LTVs. This skill had been undervalued for years, but has now come back into sharp focus. The best CFOs will use these insights to drive strategy and priorities. The worse ones will use them as a stick to complain and beat up on others.

Huw Slater, CFO (Former), TravelPerk and Typeform

It’s typical to add dedicated finance business partners aligned with Technical and GTM teams between 251–500 headcount. They can support functional leaders with budget preparation and scenario planning, and act as an early warning system if performance is moving away from target, so that you can course-correct.

Specialist finance roles are uncommon before you hit 750 headcount (or limited to specific situations—for example, fintech banking requires a treasury function, and an active M&A strategy requires corporate development).

As you scale you still want to keep your finance team as light and lean as possible. Let your bank handle treasury, and use external specialists when necessary. Only when you are near breaking point should you commit to specialist hires, such as investor relations, tax or corporate development. Avoid job creation and bloat.

Huw Slater, CFO (Former), TravelPerk and Typeform

Our analysis of the overall size of finance teams yields an average ratio of 1:35, with a range of 1:25 (25th percentile) to 1:60 (75th). There are significant differences between business models, with D2C averages being closer to 1:30, while SaaS and B2C Apps are 1:40. This broadly reflects operational complexity and transaction volume.

RATIO OF FINANCE TEAM HEADCOUNT TO TOTAL COMPANY HEADCOUNT RATIO OF FINANCE TEAM HEADCOUNT TO TOTAL COMPANY HEADCOUNT

Finance leaders often end up taking on other responsibilities, such as corporate development, legal, facilities and BI (business information). But this only works if they have sufficient capacity to do so—finance-related activity should always come first. They are less likely to have capacity if you have a more financially complex model (e.g. D2C or Marketplace). But this is also about balancing pressure on the CEO (or other executives), and determining who is best suited to run each of these functions in terms of experience and enthusiasm.

Hire a General Counsel as you scale

The complexity that comes with scale inevitably brings up more complex legal issues, such as international contracts and employees, or cross-jurisdictional data protection and intellectual property (IP) questions. At some point, you will benefit from hiring a General Counsel (GC).

ALMOST HALF OF SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES HAVE A GENERAL COUNSEL BY 250 HEADCOUNT (%) ALMOST HALF OF SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES HAVE A GENERAL COUNSEL BY 250 HEADCOUNT (%)
Three factors that influence when to hire a General Counsel

1. Business complexity—Are you in a regulated field like fintech or healthcare, or a semi-regulated one like the sharing or gig economy? Do you have a large percentage of customers or employees outside the US (or your home country)? Is there a risk of injury or serious consequences if your product fails or is misused?

2. Business velocity—How fast are you growing revenue or headcount (e.g. >50% year-on-year)?

3. Operational strength of your executive team—Do you have experienced operators yet in the CFO and Chief People Officer roles?

If the answers to 1 and 2 are yes, then a GC hire could make sense between 51–250 headcount. If the answer to 3 is also yes, you may be able to hire a Head of Legal instead, and delay hiring a GC until you are over 500 headcount. If your answers to 1 and 2 are no, you might not need a GC until you are much closer to an IPO. If your answer to 3 is also yes, then you may not need a GC at all.

Core responsibilities of a GC:
| Corporate—fundraising, M&A, stock option grants, board meeting materials and minutes
| Contracts—client, partner and vendor contracting, with self-serve processes for simpler contracts (for example, NDAs)
| IP—trademark and patent programs, and internal processes regarding the use of or contributions to open source software projects
| Employment—jurisdictional compliance, employee claims and urgent personnel issues
| Litigation—managing specialist outside counsel to initiate or to defend lawsuits
| Privacy, security and regulatory compliance—managing a global data privacy program and a data breach incident response plan that address user concerns, corporate reputation and legal requirements. Driving or contributing to public policy initiatives that relate to key business goals

Clint Smith, Chief Legal & Safety Officer, Discord

GC candidates will have deep in-house experience. They should have a strong working knowledge across all six practice areas identified above, as well as experience with establishing international operations (if relevant to your company). Your GC should be able to engage on equal terms as a partner to the CEO and board, as well as to other executives. GCs will often also attend formal (“minuted”) board meetings as observers or as corporate secretary. As a result, the GC should be a direct report to the CEO (or possibly to a President/COO). Having said this, experienced GCs should operate fairly autonomously, requiring minimal oversight or bandwidth from the CEO.

Ask yourself if legal or regulatory factors are intrinsic and strategic to your company.

Rob Miller, Chief Legal Officer, Moonbug Entertainment

Preferred candidates for any in-house hires break the mold for lawyers in some ways. You are looking for a degree of risk-appetite, someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, and with a pragmatic 80/20 approach to task-completion rather than a perfectionist. Candidates should show a genuine interest in your product and market, and in how this is evolving.

If you’re in a regulated or semi-regulated sector, prior experience in the area is critical, or at the least in an adjacent or relevant sector. If your business model involves an ambiguous legal framework (for example, the gig economy or crypto), the legal role is likely to extend to public policy and regulation, so you want to assess candidates’ aptitude in these domains. GC roles in fintech have specific demands, being much more compliance-focused rather than transactionbased: licenses, banking regulations, and constraints on advertising and marketing.

If you’re selling to enterprise (or government) clients, you should also look for specific experience with and interest in handling complex commercial negotiations, since this is likely to be the most important and time-consuming aspect of the role.

Tap into your network to identify candidates. Your corporate lawyers and your investors in particular may know lawyers in other VC-backed companies who are looking to move on. Also look for GCs who are active in legal forums such as TechGC. Otherwise, this is a role where there are a few specialist headhunters (in the US at least) with excellent networks.

The first thing an in-house lawyer will do is audit the organization for inefficiencies and potential risks, and apply Band-Aids to them. They will review due diligence reports for items that have been flagged but not fixed, and meet your existing lawyers to understand the issues they’ve spotted or relationships they’ve struggled with. They will also speak to your leadership team, and to board members, to understand business dynamics, areas of concern and strategic priorities. They should then develop a plan of action that balances:

  • Cost savings—highly appealing to the business. Optimizing external billings and relationships
  • Risk mitigation—which will rarely get people excited but is essential
  • Customer experience—for example, through simpler or faster contracting
  • Business unlocks—an ideal outcome, if there are opportunities to loosen constraints that the business had unnecessarily set itself, such as around licensing
  • Strategic priorities—ensuring sufficient capacity to handle fundraising, M&A, or other critical projects

Capable and experienced GCs may also be positioned to take on a broader remit, particularly around external elements such as:

  • International expansion
  • M&A execution
  • Partnership planning
  • Coalition building & public policy
  • ESG programs and reporting
Most of the time I’m a core member of the executive team, aligned around growth objectives. But when necessary, I’ll say, ‘Hey folks, I need to put on my [legal/ compliance] hat for a moment.’ This makes it clear that I have a serious concern, and I’ll alter my voice and demeanor too. It’s unusual, so it gets noticed.

Clint Smith, Chief Legal & Safety Officer, Discord

I’d advise any GC to become as familiar as possible with all the company’s constitutional documents. You won’t need to refer to them frequently, but when you do it will be for urgent and crucial matters.

Sam Ross, General Counsel, Remote

Breaking the mold - yellow slime mold known as P. polycephalum

Breaking the mold

Do you need a central nervous system to think, remember or take decisions? The bright yellow slime mold known as P. polycephalum would say no, if only it could talk— which, in the absence of a body, let alone a brain, it can’t. Yet these brainless blobs have shown themselves to be adept at navigating mazes, picking the most nutritious food from a menu, and slowing their movements to conserve energy in anticipation of the temperature dropping. In a famous experiment, P. polycephalum recreated the Tokyo subway system when food was placed in the locations of urban hubs, constructing an efficient nutrient transporting network rivaling the work of human engineers. Researchers have since challenged it to model routes for multiple cities, global trade channels and even the ancient Silk Road, all of which the mold mapped handily.

The mechanisms behind these intelligent behaviors are unclear, but researchers think P. polycephalum uses forms of externalized memory and internal timekeeping— marking places it has already explored with translucent goo, and modeling time using its own pulsing internal rhythm. Evolving long before humans, up to a billion years ago, these remarkable organisms illustrate the power of using minimalist solutions to intelligently navigate complexity.

Stories of Chaos

Conclusion and appendices
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Conclusion and appendices
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