After two brutal years of freezes, companies are finally hiring again. U.S. employers added 172,000 jobs in May, roughly double what economists predicted and the strongest month of a Q2 stretch where hiring kept beating forecasts. Hiring is the easy part.
At the same time, 85% of leaders say building the ability to adapt at the speed today’s market demands is critical, yet only 7% believe they’re actually leading at it, according to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report.
I grew Sombra from 4 people to 400+ as a co-founder and CTO. Along the way, I watched the same things break at the same headcount thresholds. The breakages were rarely about talent or strategy. They were about the mechanics of how a larger group of people finds problems, talks about them, and decides who acts. Here are five lessons for founders staffing up this year.
1. Bigger teams aren’t necessarily faster teams
In smaller companies, the person who spots a problem can usually fix it themselves. If not, the person who can is probably sitting in the same room. In larger companies, however, employees have to search the directory for the right person to ask, submit tickets, and wait for a fix – but not before multiple people have signed off.
Unless you shorten the distance between the person who finds an issue and the person who can address it, growth will slow you down.
The instinct is to add headcount and assume throughput goes up with it. What actually increases is the hops between a problem and its owner, so map out those hops for a few actual issues your team hit last month and count the hand-offs. Every extra step you find is a place where speed leaks out. Most of them can be closed with a clearer line of ownership, not another hire.
2. Don’t wait for small cultural problems to become big ones
You’re so focused on growing that you brush past the small tensions, missed signals, and uncomfortable conversations. There are more important things… Only, the problems that damage culture and communication often snowball when left unchecked.
You have to make them harder to ignore. The regular check-ins helped us because it was harder to brush those little tensions under the rug. Not every issue needs to go into a backlog or a risk log – sometimes that’s just another way of deprioritising it. These issues need to be raised immediately in an active growth so that teams know what matters, what is acceptable and who is responsible to help.
A small friction between two teams of 40 people becomes a structural rift at 200. The cost of addressing it early is one honest conversation, and the cost of addressing it late is attrition, rework, and a culture that learned to stay quiet. Build the habit of raising up the awkward thing while it is still small enough to handle in a single meeting.
3. Reduce reaction time
As companies grow, they naturally become slower. It’s no longer a matter of one conversation to sort things out — the process now requires input from several teams, each with its own ways of working.
You have to accept that, in some ways, change will take more effort. But you can avoid falling behind by making reaction time faster on purpose: create a rulebook of who gets informed, who makes the call, and what gets moved up on the list. “Be more agile” is good advice only when it comes with guidance that teams can actually follow.
A rulebook may sound like bureaucracy, and when done badly, it becomes exactly that. Done well, it removes the meeting-about-the-meeting that eats your week. For the decisions that recur most often, write down who needs to know, who decides, and how something jumps the queue. When those answers live in a document instead of in your head, your team stops waiting on you to unblock them.
4. Give teams clearer signals
As headcount grows, leaders can no longer stay that close to day-to-day work. The problem may be that teams are unsure about their priorities, who owns what, and how everyday decisions should be made. They might also follow different signals, which makes communication even more difficult.
Sombra’s rapid growth has made me a big believer in clear leadership signals — simple, repeated priorities that help everyone stay on the same page. For example, what is most important this quarter, what trade-offs are acceptable, what success looks like, and when more speed, effort, or focus is expected. Teams feel more confident when leaders repeat the same priorities and make them easy to follow.
The mistake leaders make here is assuming a message lands the first time they say it. It rarely does. The priorities you find tedious to repeat are the ones your team is still trying to read from your behaviour. Say them again, say them the same way, and let the consistency do the work that proximity used to do when everyone sat together.
5. You have to concede some control
Founders want to be involved in the day-to-day and have the final say in everything, but that becomes much harder as the business grows. You have to show trust in your teams to make decisions, or you spread your time and energy too thin, make poor calls, and inevitably burn out.
Your job isn’t to run every department. It’s to dictate what they should be aiming to achieve. What’s the goal this quarter? Which customers are the priority? What’s next on the roadmap? Clear direction breeds confidence, which helps teams make the right decisions.
Letting go feels like risky, and it really is, but only at first. The teams you trust will make calls you would have made differently. Some, of course, will be better than yours, and the ones that miss become lessons learned rather than catastrophes, provided you set the destination clearly enough that small course corrections stay small. So pass the wheel and hold the direction. And you get back the time and focus that scaling demands of you.
Growth exposes the seams in how a company works. The companies that scale well are the ones that treat those seams as something to design for ahead of time. Get closer to the action and make small things happen early. Decide on purpose faster. Do your priorities over again and don’t forget to trust your people. All that may sound unglamorous, but that is exactly what the market will demand from the founders who did the hiring.
