How should a fast-growing company structure its teams as it scales?

Sebastian Siemiatkowski · Mar 1, 2021

Organising the company into small (~eight-person) cross-competence teams with an accountable lead acting as mini-CEO, their own roadmap, vision and KPIs, which dissolve and re-form organically around new objectives, lets a fast-growing company change frequently without people fearing for their job, title or career

As companies grow, management organizes the company to be legible to managers, which destroys the sense of purpose for the person actually doing the job; managing complexity is what managers are paid for

18:55 20VC: Klarna Founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski on Scaling Europe's Most Valuable Private Tech Company, How To Motivate and Challenge Your Team Most Effectively & The Biggest Lessons From Working with Mike Moritz

Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

A company should be structured as many small autonomous teams of five to ten people owning specific product areas, because high ownership lets them move quickly and see results iteratively.

Ownership plus fast feedback loops means teams execute and improve much faster.

Scope: describes ElevenLabs at 250 people run as ~20 such teams

37:33 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

Alan Chang · Jan 5, 2026

Speed of execution comes from small teams operating as independent units with very clear goals, monitored on output — leave them alone if they deliver, replace the team if they don't

8:24 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

Arthur Mensch · Apr 29, 2024

A research team of five moves faster than a team of fifty, unless the fifty are organized as ten sufficiently uncoupled teams of five

He learned this the hard way at DeepMind, and structured Mistral's science team differently as a result

Scope: exception when large teams are decomposed into loosely coupled small teams

5:20 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position

Arthur Mensch · Apr 29, 2024

Because the different directions of general-purpose model development are loosely coupled, teams should share infrastructure, code base and findings while minimizing the time spent in coordination meetings

Languages, code, math, reasoning and multimodality are loosely coupled directions; shared frameworks help but coordination overhead destroys speed

Scope: easier at 25 people; will get harder as the team scales

5:54 20VC: Mistral's Arthur Mensch: Are Foundation Models Commoditising | How Do We Solve the Problem of Compute | Is There Value in the Application Layer | Open vs Closed: Who Wins and Mistral's Position

Elias Torres · Mar 21, 2025

The right operating model is a single daily show-your-work meeting for the whole team, and once you outgrow it, splitting into small groups of ten that each own a product

It kept his own time on selling and helping customers rather than meetings, and it is how he built the HubSpot team

19:20 Single daily show your work meeting scaling to pods of ten

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Keeping teams very small — and adding more teams rather than growing them — is essential to preserving speed as a company scales

It is the codified practice of the really great companies (Amazon's two-pizza teams, Google's 'team you can feed around a table')

13:52 Keep teams small and add more teams rather than growing existing ones preserves speed