In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Kristi Essick chats with Julia Austin, executive fellow at Harvard Business School, about After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup (Basic Venture/Hachette Book Group, June 2025). While founders may find it lonely at the top, Austin argues that it doesn’t have to be. Drawing on her own observations and stories from dozens of founders, she reveals how a solid approach to operations, culture, and talent can make, not break, your growing start-up. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why did you write this book?
I wrote this book because of the start-up operations course that I taught at Harvard Business School. I saw a lot of MBA students who were starting their ventures while they were in school and weren’t feeling equipped to do the basic operations around their company.
I decided I should democratize this course and make it available to anybody who is either currently doing a start-up or thinking about doing a start-up. My goal was to make the start-up world and entrepreneurship accessible to them, and to be their guide along the way.
Why is the growth phase so challenging?
When you’re building at breakneck speed, you can often lose sight of operations and organizational components that can slow you down. When you start to see that hockey stick of growth, you’re spending time either fixing a lot of things that are broken or that you wish you had attended to earlier. That can eventually lead to the demise of not just the start-up but a new initiative in a big organization.
The other thing that can happen is organizational debt, which is a fast-paced need to hire, to bring people on board without a lot of thought about culture and about whether you have the right people for the right roles. That can be fine earlier on, when you’re scrappy and just moving forward.
During the period of rapid growth, you need to bring in people who “have seen the movie before.” They know what to expect, what good looks like, what scale feels like, and know who can bring the company to the next level. The adage of “what got you here doesn’t necessarily get you there” applies to being prepared for that shift.
Why should founders take it slow?
The product itself is not the whole company. Operations and everything that surrounds the product will eventually determine whether the business succeeds or fails. Clarifying the problem that you want to solve and who you’re solving it for will inform all the other functions of the business. It will determine marketing, sales, support, who you hire, and how you execute your go-to-market strategy.
I’ll share an example of a business I write about in my book. Two cofounders of a business wanted to create a consumer product to solve for losing valuable items such as headphones or laptops. In 2018, the original plan was a creation that would solve that problem, using QR codes, which at the time were pretty novel.
Clarifying the problem that you want to solve and who you’re solving it for will inform all the other functions of the business.
Through their discovery work, they realized that becoming an insurance business that offered customers reimbursement for lost items was a better way to generate revenue. It was tricky to figure out how they were going to solve a consumer problem, which would’ve resulted in hiring a particular type of team. Ultimately, they would need a team knowledgeable about a direct-to-consumer product and about how to brand it using social media.
Once the business completed more discovery, the team realized there was another problem to solve. The big brands also wanted to use QR codes to get closer to their customers. The brands were achieving that by having customers scan and use the codes to learn more about the brands and what they were doing with the products.
That discovery led the cofounders to pivot completely from their initial B2C business plan toward a B2B solution: working with brands to put QR codes on their products.
Both cofounders are much more excited about the B2B plan, which aligns with their interests and backgrounds and reflects the “founder–market fit.” By slowing down and understanding the problem, they developed a much better business, which is thriving today.
How can founders feel less lonely?
Even if you have cofounders, being a founder can still feel isolating. There are questions that come up where you think, “I’m not sure there’s anybody here who can really answer them for me,” or some that stress you out.
The first thing I recommend to every founder is find your community. Find other entrepreneurs, people who understand the challenges that you’re dealing with. Perhaps they’re a little bit further along than you but can give you validation. They can say, “This is normal. This is how we dealt with it.” They can also share best practices.
The first thing I recommend to every founder is find your community. Find other entrepreneurs, people who understand the challenges that you’re dealing with.
Oftentimes, your competitors will be among your community of entrepreneurs. That doesn’t matter. They want to help and support fellow entrepreneurs. You could find your community through an accelerator program, through colleagues from school, or in your city.
The second thing that I recommend is that you secure a coach. [Founding a start-up] is a tough journey. It is not only isolating but also can be super stressful. If you have other challenges in your life or mental health issues that you’ve dealt with in the past, it may be a good time to seek additional support, such as therapy, coaching, and community.
Why is the product not the company?
If we only focus on product, which is fun, sexy, and cool, we can lose sight of all the other components of a business that make the business thrive. One cannot work without the others.
You need those other components: operations, a great team, and a great culture. If we lose sight of those things, the business can slow down. It might become hard to raise additional money. And the business could fail.
I encourage everyone to explore what else is happening related to your business. That is a core focus of my course and my book. What operational things do you need to be aware of so that you’re not blindsided?
These efforts will take you away from the product. Once you resolve legal, financial, and your talent situations, then you can have a lot of fun with product. Yet if you don’t have the rest of the business structured around the product, it won’t matter.
What does it really take to scale?
When we start a business, we don’t often know what we need in terms of talent and extra folks on our team. It could be that we love the person, but the business is going in a different direction. Yet we wait too long to make the call. If I had a nickel for every founder who said to me, “Gosh, I wish I had made that decision sooner and just gotten it over with.” The angst associated with making mistakes weighs on them very heavily and distracts them from the rest of the business. It delays the inevitable: getting the next person on board.
Beyond that, scaling involves building the culture for the organization. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to start thinking about culture from day one. A tiny team of five or six people may think, “Why do we need to worry about culture at this point in time?” Yet you are seeding the culture of a bigger organization.
Scaling involves building the culture for the organization. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to start thinking about culture from day one.
For example, I’m working with a second-time founder, who has a ten-person team right now. He learned from his last venture that culture was everything. When they hit a milestone, if it’s a development milestone, or a fundraising milestone, whatever it is, they all go out for ice cream, or play pool together, or do something to celebrate the milestone.
Even though that seems really basic, scaling means building the culture that over time, as a business scales, will already be embedded in the system of the business. The opposite would be playing catch-up, because you’re hiring a ton of people early on and not really forging the relationships and the connections that will help you get through harder times and scale.
Do all start-ups need venture capital?
There are certainly businesses that are capital-intensive companies. That require material supplies, such as a consumer goods, or even an AI company that relies on a lot of compute, which is very expensive.
They may need capital purely to stay alive; that’s just the reality of the type of business they’re building. But there are a lot of businesses that don’t need that much cash. There’s a myth that says you aren’t a real venture if you haven’t raised capital.
Capital is the fuel that makes the boat go to the destination. It’s not the destination itself. These days, especially with AI, there are a lot of things that you can do very cheaply, without having to spend a lot of money. You can code very easily with tools that are out there, even low-code, no-code.
You can do a lot with resources abroad, offshore, that can augment things like development, marketing, or other efforts, without spending a lot of money. You can also access capital in other ways—from friends and family who love you and believe in you to business loans, small-business loans, and grants.
The other myth associated with entrepreneurship is that by being an entrepreneur, you’re your own boss. Yet, the reality is if you raise capital, you’re not your own boss. Investors, especially if they’re institutional venture capitalists, are now your “bosses.” You’ll probably have more than one of them.
Ideally, they’re great, and they’re supportive. They offer network, credibility, and, obviously, capital to do what it is that you need to do. But you are now accountable and beholden to those individuals.
I’m seeing a trend where more and more founders are opting not to raise capital, or to reach profitability earlier, so that they experience the amount of autonomy they seek, even if that means they might not achieve billion-dollar-valuation success.
Why is delegating important?
One of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to grapple with is letting go of their “baby,” and learning what to delegate versus what to hold on to. I often use a driving metaphor where you’re in the seat of a car. You’re driving the car. You’re by yourself, or maybe your cofounder is sitting next to you. It’s time for you to move into the copilot seat, and maybe eventually the back seat, and then leave the car.
Maybe the people you hire won’t do it exactly the way you do it. But they will do it well enough. That’s what you hired them for. It doesn’t mean you have to let go completely. You still need to be plugged in and involved, but you have to trust the people you build. Otherwise, you’re going to hold on so tight that the team really can’t thrive and grow. That will eventually slow them down.
Ultimately, you are still the leader, the CEO, or the founder. But trusting the team to work well together, and fostering communication and collaboration, versus your having to remain in the middle of everything, is important.
What surprised you in writing this book?
The thing that was the most surprising to me was reaching out to many founders. I spoke with dozens of founders for this book. Everyone was so willing to share their stories, even the stories about the mistakes that they made.
Great war stories about real faux pas or near-death stories. Founders shared a lot of stories about businesses that almost went under. I’ve experienced that myself at Akamai. The business almost imploded at least two times, including during the internet bust.
The founders’ willingness to share the stories to pay it forward and have other founders learn from their experiences was delightful. I didn’t expect such raw willingness to share “the ugly,” and to let others learn from their mistakes.
Watch the full interview
