High Growth Handbook

The operational handbook for scaling startups from product-market fit through rapid growth to IPO, based on Gil's experience as a founder and operator at Google and Twitter and on extensive interviews with people like Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Sam Altman. The book is more tactical than most in this library — it covers board management, M&A mechanics, executive hiring, and late-stage fundraising with a specificity that few authors are positioned to provide. Gil's particular strength is his treatment of the phase transitions that organisations go through as they scale: the practices that work at fifty people actively harm you at five hundred, and recognising the transition points is a skill most founders learn too late. For product directors, the chapters on product management at scale and on building an executive team are directly applicable. It is the kind of book you keep on your desk during a specific period of organisational growth and then hand to the next person entering that phase.