Operating partner — I take companies from 40 people to 400 without breaking them
I spent eleven years inside scaling businesses before I started advising them, which is the only reason anyone should listen to me. Two of those years were the bad kind: a Series B that tripled headcount in nine months and lost every senior engineer it had. I learned more there than in the two exits. My work is unglamorous. I sit with founders and heads of function and rebuild the parts of a company that stop working at scale — how decisions get made, who owns what, what gets measured, and which meetings should not exist. I do not write strategy decks that nobody reads. I write operating cadences, and then I stay long enough to see whether they hold. I work with four companies at a time and no more. I speak at a handful of events a year, usually about the failure rather than the exits.
Marcus told us in week two that our problem was not hiring speed, it was that nobody could name who decided anything. He was right and it cost us six months to admit it. Eighteen months later we are five times the size and the exec team has not turned over once.
Priya Raghunathan
Co-founder & CEO, fintech Series C
The full set of documents I install in a company: weekly business review agenda, decision-rights matrix, the escalation path, and the four meeting formats that replace the eleven you have. Editable, not a PDF of screenshots.
Send me your org chart, your meeting calendar and your last three all-hands decks. I return a recorded 45-minute teardown naming where decisions actually get stuck, plus a written one-page redesign. Ten days.
The scorecards I use for VP Engineering, CFO, CPO, VP Sales and eight more: the questions, the disqualifiers, and the reference-call script that gets past the polite answers.
