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  • High Growth Handbook
  • About the Author
  • How to use this book
  • Interviews
  • Introduction
    • Welcome to the High Growth Handbook
    • An Interview with MARC ANDREESSEN
  • Chapter 1: The Role of the CEO
    • The role of the CEO: managing yourself
    • Personal time management
    • Delegate
    • Audit your calendar weekly, then monthly
    • Learn to say no
    • Realize your old patterns of work can no longer apply
    • Take vacations & time off
    • Work on things you care about
    • The role of the CEO: managing your reports
    • An interview with CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON
    • Insights: Working with Claire
    • The changing cofounder dynamic
  • Chapter 2: Managing the board
    • “Hiring” Your Board of Directors
    • Choosing a VC Partner who is right for your board
    • Choosing an Independent Board Member
    • The chairman of the board
    • Board diversity
    • Ways to source diverse board candidates
    • Board evolution over time
    • Removing members from your board
    • Removing VC Board members
    • Removing independent board members
    • Independent board seat structures
    • An interview with REID HOFFMAN
    • The role of the CEO: Managing your board of directors
    • Board meeting structure
    • Board meeting agenda
    • Board observers and random people showing up to board meetings
    • Other board interactions
    • An interview with NAVAL RAVIKANT (part 1)
  • Chapter 3: Recruiting, hiring, and managing talent
    • Recruiting best practices
    • Write a job description for every role
    • Ask every candidate the same questions
    • Assign focus areas to interviewers prior to the interview
    • Work product interviews
    • Candidate scoring
    • Move fast
    • Check candidates’ references
    • Diverse candidates
    • Scaling a recruiting organization
    • Early days: your team as recruiters
    • Initial scaling: the in-house recruiter
    • High-growth: multiple recruiting org roles
    • Executive hires: retained recruiter
    • Employee onboarding
    • Send out a welcome letter
    • Buddy system
    • Welcome package
    • Make sure they have real ownership
    • Set goals
    • Old-timer syndrome & early employees
    • Early employees that scale
    • Old-timers that should move on
    • An interview with SAM ALTMAN
  • Chapter 4: Building the executive team
    • Hiring executives
    • Hire for the next 12–18 months
    • Traits to look for in executives
    • Define the role & meet with people who do it well
    • Know that you will screw it up once or twice
    • An interview with KEITH RABOIS (Part 1)
    • Do you need a COO?
    • Why a COO?
    • Why not a COO?
    • How do you choose a COO?
    • An interview with AARON LEVIE
    • Executive titles and pragmatism
    • Firing executives
    • How to hire great business development people
    • Great business development people
    • Bad business development people
    • How to screen for a great business development person
    • A great deal person is not usually a great partner manager
    • An interview with MARIAM NAFICY
  • Chapter 5: Organizational structure and hypergrowth
    • Organizational growth is all about pragmatism
    • If you are growing fast, you have a different company every 6–12 months
    • There is no “right answer”
    • Sometimes bandwidth matters more than perfect fit.
    • Org structure is often about tie-breaking.
    • Hire executives for the next 12–18 months, not eternity.
    • Doing a re-organization
    • Re-orgs at the company level and the functional level
    • How to do a re-org
    • An interview with RUCHI SANGHVI
    • Company culture and its evolution
    • Never, ever compromise: hiring for culture
    • Bad culture leads to pain
    • How to build a strong culture
    • Hiring for culture & values
    • An interview with PATRICK COLLISON
    • Diversity hiring
    • An interview with JOELLE EMERSON
    • Managing in a downturn
  • Chapter 6: Marketing and PR
    • Marketing, PR, communications, growth and your brand
    • Growth marketing
    • Product marketing
    • Brand marketing
    • PR and communications
    • Hiring marketing and PR teams
    • Marketing organization structure
    • To PR or not PR
    • An interview with SHANNON STUBO BRAYTON
    • PR Basics
    • Get media trained
    • Iterate on the company pitch
    • “On background” versus “off the record” versus “on the record”
    • Correcting factual errors
    • Press agendas
    • Hiring great PR people
    • Press relationship building
    • Engage PR early
    • Press does not equal success
    • PR & crisis management
    • An interview with ERIN FORS
  • Chapter 7: Product Management
    • Product management overview
    • What do product managers do?
    • Do you have the right people?
    • Characteristics of great product managers
    • The four types of product managers
    • Not a product manager: project managers.
    • Associate product managers (APMs)/rotational product managers (RPMs)
    • Interviewing PMs
    • Reference-check all your product hires
    • Product, design, an engineering: How they fit together
    • Hiring a strong VP product
    • Empowering the VP Product
    • Product management processes
    • Product management conversion and training
    • Product to distribution mindset
  • Chapter 8: Financing and valuation
    • Money money money
    • Late-stage financing: who should you be talking to?
    • Types of late-stage investors
    • How to evaluate late-stage funding sources
    • Key terms
    • One word of caution
    • Don’t over-optimize your valuation
    • Founder pressure
    • Secondary stock sales
    • $500 million tends to be a transition point
    • Founder sales
    • If you do not regulate secondary sales early, it may backfire on you
    • Types of secondary sales
    • Information sharing and secondary buyers
    • How much stock should employees be able to sell?
    • Investor sales: An opportunity to renegotiate
    • Locking up future sales
    • 409A and RSUs
    • Moving to RSUs
    • The secondary stock sale: The employee perspective
    • IPOs: Taking a company public
    • Benefits of going public
    • Cons of going public
    • Market cycles
    • IPO process
    • An interview with KEITH RABOIS (part 2)
    • An interview with NAVAL RAVIKANT (part 2)
  • Chapter 9: Mergers & acquisitions
    • M&A: Buying other companies
    • When should you start to buy other companies?
    • Three types of acquisitions
    • M&A road map
    • Managing internal stakeholders
    • Dealing with objections
    • M&A interview processes
    • M&A: How to set a valuation for companies you buy
    • Valuation factors to assess for all three types of M&A
    • Team buys or acqui-hires
    • Product buys
    • Strategic buys
    • M&A: Convincing someone (and their major investors) to sell
    • Convincing people to sell: team & product buys
    • Convincing founders to sell: strategic buys
    • M&A: Negotiate the acquisition
    • Negotiate the sale: strategic asset
    • An interview with HEMANT TANEJA
  • Things to just say no to
  • Extra Resources
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Chapter

Chapter 1: The Role of the CEO

Three key tactical duties of a CEO that often go underdiscussed: how to manage yourself, your reports, and your board of directors.

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Articles
The role of the CEO: managing yourself
The role of the CEO: managing your reports
An interview with Claire Hughes Johnson
Working with Claire: an unauthorized guide
The changing co-founder dynamic

Stripe Press publishes books about economic and technological advancement.

High Growth Handbook © Elad Gil 2026

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