Managing a start-up is difficult, complicated, and often lonely.
It’s difficult for new founders but also for serial ones. Its complicated because the foundation and infrastructure of the startup need to be aligned with the business stage.

Each business stage brings different challenges from within and from the outside, and each inflection point (mainly post round) brings different growing pains.

We know that many start-ups fail due to lack of management skills and organizational scale-up capabilities and not only because of business reasons.
In a 2016 study, 92% of 13,000 venture capitalist surveyed by the National Bureau of Economic Research identified the management team as the most important factor in start-up failures.

Founders must develop the right organizational scale up strategy for each phase and pay much more attention and focus on these aspects:

• Establishing high performing teams and building the right culture to support the start-up’s strategy
• Implementing the “right” structure to each business stage and manage a collaborative work and avoid silos.
• Set the right organizational processes. Such as: communication and alignment, decision making, measurement of OKR, performance management and feedback
• Manage the cultural, functional and time differences between the sites in Israel, EMEA, US and Asia.
• And more…

In my research I identified for each size of startup (# of employees) what the key growth engines that important to leverage and what are the main risks or potential crisis for each business stage.