Article · About a 20 minute read

You're Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Matt Lerner · First Round Review Free Intermediate

This is the most direct piece we found on the founder-led versus formal-function question, and it argues hard that most early teams hire too soon. Lerner (ex PayPal growth lead, now running SYSTM) makes the case that if you cannot yet name your growth lever and how you pull it, you are not hiring someone to run growth, you are hiring someone to figure it out, which rarely works. It gives you a concrete founder-led playbook to run first and a clear signal for when a real hire finally makes sense.

  • Delegating growth before you understand it fails because an outside hire lacks the context only the founder has earned; founders should own growth discovery first.
  • The readiness test is practical: you should be able to answer what your first growth lever is, how you pull it, and what reliably brings customers at scale before you hire.
  • Hire when you have found the levers and the real question has shifted to running experiments at scale, not when growth simply feels slow or hard.
Open on review.firstround.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. Should I try to close my first 10 customers one by one, or run a small launch to get them all at once?
  2. When is it worth hiring a growth person or setting up a real growth process, versus keeping it founder-led?

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