Upscale: What it Takes to Scale a Startup by the People Who've Done It

by James Silver, Gerard Grech (Introduction)(Contributor), Gideon Turner (Narrator)

Start-ups are born to fail. Around three quarters of venture capital-backed new companies never return cash to investors. 'UPSCALE' is about the other 25%.

"I feel like I woke up one morning to find I have board, investors and 80 people to manage - and I don't have a clue how to do it." (Asi Sharabi, co-founder, Wonderbly)

At a time when more people than ever are starting companies in Britain - over 2,000
new businesses are launched every day - 'UPSCALE' focuses on the moment founders floor the accelerator and their company goes from a bunch of friends in a co-working space to hundreds of employees often scattered around the world.

Speaking to some of the UK's leading technology entrepreneurs and investors - including Brent Hoberman (lastminute.com, Founders Factory), Wendy Tan White (BGF, Moonfruit), Neil Rimer (Index Ventures), Suranga Chandratillake (Balderton Capital), Saul Klein (LocalGlobe), and Sarah Wood (Unruly) - who, between them, have built or backed companies worth billions, journalist James Silver covers the most pressing practical and often painful issues founders face: from coping with stress to getting shot of a bad hire to handling a tricky board member and opening a first overseas office.

By founders for founders, and those toying with starting a business, 'UPSCALE' (based on the Tech Nation program of the same name) avoids the theorizing and platitudes of typical business books, in favor of hard-headed advice from those who've succeeded and the mistakes to look out for along the way.



RUNNING TIME ➼ 8hrs. and 36mins.

©2018 Tech Nation (P)2019 Tech Nation

Genres: Business, Management

Audible Audio

First published November 18, 2018

Reviews

[Boni Aditya · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have read another book about scaling in a similar vein but a bit different.
MASTERS OF SCALE by Reid Hoffman is also a similar collection of chapters derived from his podcast of the same name.

Finding a few random topics to discuss about and stitching them into a rag tag suit will not really make a good look.
This book like the previous attempt also fails miserably in capturing a meaningful order about what it takes to scale.
Most of the lessons are mushy and soft, i.e. there is nothing that really talks about how to scale, but it talks about hiring, buliding teams, psychology of founders, mental issues, how to build companies and so on...
It does not really talk about the hard core stuff or the real stuff about how people actually scale companies or dynamics behind scaling companies.

The entire book is filled with lesson about how to apply a hood, nice finish look on the car after the engine, transmission has been created.

The book and the author confuse the outcomes with causes. Post Hoc Fallacy. The author talked to successful founders and they talked about what happens after they have the scaling engine.
They talk about building teams for the growth that is created by something else. They talk about building their processes, which are a result of the growth that has already happened.

All these are done after the scale or growth beings and is flowing out of control, then you expand and then you do all these rituals.
But what caused that growth?
What is the underlying principle, what is the secret sauce for their growth. What are the growth engine? What are the dynamics behind their growth? What is the strategy of their growth? What is the domain specific knowledge behind their growth? What are the first principles behind the growth? What are the mental models? Nope nothing of that sort is mentioned remotely in this book anywhere.

It is just filled with anecdotes and personal experiences of founders and those experiences that they are willing to divulge, almost all of them are about the soft skills about what they did after the growth has happened.

What actually triggered the growth and the scale phase, nobody seems to talk about that? What did they do right to hit the growth spurt? Nobody seems to care.

I would say it is an absolute waste of my time with almost zero insights derived from this huge volume, which is nothing but startup and founder small talk and blabber at many points.

[Lola Alli · Rating 5 out of 5]

The content of the book applies to many industries. It prioritises every major stage of starting and scaling a startup without losing sight of the underlying principles of running a business. Few books have been able to achieve both and this is most certainly one of them.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who isn’t the CEO of a company, the book wasn’t super relevant. But, as someone working in a startup on the scale up journey, some of this felt really introductory. Perhaps I’m just lucky that the company I work for is clearly on it, and following pretty much every principle outlined in each chapter.

Canny read. Decent stories. I liked the alternating narratives. Perhaps I just wasn’t the right audience.