Three Years, Ten Times the Staff

Ben and Laura, co-founders of an Austin fintech scale-up, discuss how the company changed since growing from 50 to 500 employees.

Three Years, Ten Times the Staff

Listen and choose the right answer

What is Ben's main complaint about the current state of the company?

• The company is losing money rapidly.
• The company is much slower at shipping features due to overhead.
• The engineering team refuses to use new software.

How did the company's headcount change over the three-year period?

• It grew from 50 to 500 employees.
• It decreased from 500 to 50 employees.
• It stayed constant at around 200 employees.

What unexpected truth is revealed near the end of the conversation?

• The company is facing bankruptcy.
• Most delays are caused by a permanent panic rule Ben created years ago.
• Laura wants to resign as Chief Operating Officer.

What do Ben and Laura decide to do about the approval bottleneck?

• Keep it to satisfy government regulators.
• Scrap it to speed up workflows across departments.
• Expand it to include more managers.

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Laura: Well, that's what happens when you go through ____ and your headcount jumps from fifty to five hundred in three years.
• Ben: I know, but this ____ is killing our momentum. Every decision gets bogged down by process debt and red tape.
• Laura: True, but let's be fair. To professionalise our operations, we had to codify processes and move away from pure ____ .
• Ben: True enough. Our current structure is a far cry from that chaotic ____ we had in our first Austin office.
• Laura: And remember our ____ last year? That brought massive scaling pains, but every new layer of management was every bit as necessary as it was painful.

Sources: photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels