[ruff]

This is interesting—as someone who is part of a "management team" at a company that has grown rapidly from startup to perhaps a post-startup stage, there is some truth to this.

There's a giant void of advice out there for folks who are making this transition. It's awkward and really challenging; like hitting puberty for your company (I like to say we've got braces right now). HN and publications focus a lot on startups. Business education and literature is heavily focused on "management" in the sense of Fortune 500 like worlds (I've been in that world as well). My sense is those two appeal to much wider, paying audiences where much smaller sets of people actually make these jumps. There's very little advice/tips/thoughts about how you steer your company as you get more customers (e.g. how to manage early customers who got more attention as you were proving your product vs. later on when the cost of that attention might be a challenge), hire a lot of employees (training, compensation models, etc.), build out teams (trade-offs of various structures, ability to repeat and scale), etc. This stuff is hard and unless you're growing at such a rate you can ignore it until much later on, you have to deal with it.

Does anyone out there have a collection of posts/tidbits/advice for others who have actually managed through these transitions? The linked post talks about trial-and-error. I'd love to read about what worked and what didn't for others.