How are you preserving the culture and keeping your best teammates? Usually the pressure to stop R&D and focus only on margin expansion makes this hard to do - that your experience yet or things still good?
Great question. That's not been our experience. Right now, we're in growth mode. Hire hire hire. Go faster.
Are we watching product margin and taking action to maximize it? Absolutely. But that's all revolved around technical steps (LLM token caching for example). Our current Product and Engineering headcount is only around 15 so we're already lean. We need to hire more, but we're keeping the bar high. I have no goal for bloating an engineering team just to make it look like we're doing the right thing (hiring). Every hire has to add immense value.
We're living in a time where success as a small team doesn't have to mean the team growing to be so big it's not fun anymore. The best cultures I've been a part of have always revolved around highly skilled small team of people that work their tails off and depend on each other.
Comments
How are you preserving the culture and keeping your best teammates? Usually the pressure to stop R&D and focus only on margin expansion makes this hard to do - that your experience yet or things still good?
Great question. That's not been our experience. Right now, we're in growth mode. Hire hire hire. Go faster.
Are we watching product margin and taking action to maximize it? Absolutely. But that's all revolved around technical steps (LLM token caching for example). Our current Product and Engineering headcount is only around 15 so we're already lean. We need to hire more, but we're keeping the bar high. I have no goal for bloating an engineering team just to make it look like we're doing the right thing (hiring). Every hire has to add immense value.
We're living in a time where success as a small team doesn't have to mean the team growing to be so big it's not fun anymore. The best cultures I've been a part of have always revolved around highly skilled small team of people that work their tails off and depend on each other.
That's how it started for us. Make sure you achieve and maintain great profitability, PE operates very differently from VC.