High Growth Handbook

Gil assembles operating guidance for companies moving from roughly ten to several thousand employees, the stage he argues is least covered by existing startup writing. He worked at Google, co-founded Color Genomics, and has advised or invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Instacart and others, and the book draws on that specific stage of those companies.

The material covers the CEO's changing role, managing the board, hiring and organising executive teams, mergers and acquisitions, later-stage financing, and the mechanics of running a company that is doubling. The chapters on executive hiring are the most concrete, covering when to hire each functional leader, how to assess candidates who have operated at larger scale, and how to remove executives who have stopped scaling. Gil argues that most founders wait too long on both hiring and firing.

A large part of the book is interviews, including Reid Hoffman on blitzscaling, Marc Andreessen on the CEO role and board management, Claire Hughes Johnson on operations, Aaron Levie on marketing, Sam Altman on late-stage financing and Naval Ravikant on secondary sales. These give first-person detail rather than framework.

The book is a compilation, so it is uneven and repeats itself. It assumes venture-funded companies growing quickly in Silicon Valley and does not transfer well to other financing or growth models. The advice is specific to conditions between roughly 2010 and 2018, particularly on financing and on secondary markets. It is best used as a reference for a specific problem rather than read through.