A practical framework for scaling your executive bench
how outlier organizations have approached this, plus a deep dive by function
A practical framework for scaling your executive bench
Felicis backs founders building iconic companies and we invest directly in their growth to make them unbreakable. A large part of my role as Talent Partner is to invest in our founders by helping them to see around corners and scale their success through their functional leaders.
When companies are small, it’s easier for founders to define and reach the right outcomes through 1:1 interactions and quick iterations. As companies scale, it becomes more difficult to reach the necessary outcomes through those same interactions and iterations - the needs of the business become more complex. To be successful, founders must prioritize a strong executive bench that can deliver the right outcomes at every stage of scale.
A highly effective bench requires founders to understand the necessary outputs of these functional leaders at every level of growth. Founders must also objectively identify when a company is scaling past the expertise of its existing functional leaders and understand the profiles that are motivated by, and capable of, delivering on these evolving requirements for success. This can be especially challenging.
To support founders on this journey, we gathered data on the executive benches of 30 outlier companies over the last decade at each funding round. And further, we married that data with a map of the evolving expectations by function to help founders see around corners and better enable them to build a bench that accelerates or supports growth at every scale.
Methodology
We started by defining a list of 30 outlier companies over the last decade; “outlier” being defined by a successful IPO and market cap of >$5b or a private company with a valuation of >$5b (list in appendix). We then spent over 300 hours researching and verifying the publicly available People/Title/team data and fundraising data to identify the most senior leaders across each function at each round of funding. We leveraged secondary data found on Crunchbase, Pitchbook, AngelList Talent, Craft, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Insights, company blogs and press releases.
What we found, at a glance
Early sales leaders were very unlikely to scale a company - most C level executives were hired around Series C and were replaced before IPO
Technology functions were the earliest to have a C-level executive (although, usually a founder), the most likely to have an early C-level executive that scaled through various rounds, and the most likely to have a C level at later stage without public company experience
Finance functions hired a “Head of Finance” around Series A. The first CFOs joined around Series C and were extremely unlikely to be promoted into the CFO role, not at all likely to scale, and required the most public company expertise at later stage and/or time of IPO
C-level People leaders appeared the most likely to scale from mid-stage through IPO, most likely to be promoted internally, and usually replaced an early manager or Head of who joined at or around 50 employees
How this may look in practice
(This is directional and not a one-size-fits-all representation)
For a detailed drill down of the evolving leadership expectations for Sales, Engineering, People, and Finance at each funding round, check out the full post on our Felicis insights page!