Episode 790 | From Scrappy to Scalable: Evolving Your Role as a Founder

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can you scale yourself as a founder? In this episode, Rob Walling is joined by Yaniv Bernstein (co-founder and CTO of Vera, former COO, VP of Engineering, and Google leader) to unpack how a founder’s role must change as the company grows. From writing the code yourself to leading managers of managers, they dig into the tough transitions every founder faces, and what happens if you don’t adapt. Topics we cover: (3:27) – How the founder/CEO role changes as your SaaS scales (8:44) – The turning point where systems and processes matter (14:49 – When to hand off marketing, sales, or product as a founder (19:44) – Why setting context is your #1 job as a founder-CEO (28:19) – Why hiring right (and firing fast) makes or breaks scaling Links from the Show: SaaS Institute MicroConf | The community for SaaS founders MicroConf YouTube Channel People Engineering The SaaS Playbook Yaniv Bernstein | LinkedIn Yaniv Bernstein (@ybernsteindig) | X The Startup Podcast If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's another episode of startups for the rest of us.
0:02.9	I'm Rob Walling, and this week I talked to Yonov Bernstein, who has been both a founder
0:07.9	and an executive at companies ranging from small startups up to very large orgs, including
0:14.9	10 years at Google.
0:17.1	He's been a VP of Engineering.
0:18.5	He's been a C-O.
0:20.2	He's been a consultant and he was a software engineering
0:23.3	leader at Google. And these days, he's been giving advice to founders that want to go from startup to scale up.
0:31.2	He's seen a lot of companies fail as many of us do as they try to get past that 1,000, 5 million, 10 million, AAR phase.
0:39.4	And one of the big drags on a company as it grows is when a founder isn't able to make that
0:44.2	transition from being the CEO of a 10, 20-person company up into the 50, 100, 200-person company.
0:51.8	And that's what we focus on today as we talk about going from scrappy
0:55.0	to scalable, what it looks like to evolve your role as a founder as your company gets bigger.
1:01.6	And speaking of growing your company, I run a premium coaching program called the SAS Institute.
1:08.8	SAS Institute is a private coaching community designed for B2B
1:12.7	and B2C SaaS founders doing a million in ARR or more. There's one-on-one coaching, there are
1:19.2	masterminds, and there is an amazing online community that will be meeting in person. The
1:25.0	idea is to get you the systems and the support you need to scale from
1:29.1	a million or more up into the 10, 15, and 20 million dollars marks. We have some incredible coaches,
1:37.2	including Jordan Gall, Taylor Hendrickson, and Mark Thomas, and our first group is very small,
1:43.0	and that's amazing because you get a lot of one-on-one attention.
1:47.2	In addition, you get to chat with me and get my best advice.
	...

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