How Founders Should Lead Growth (Before Hiring)

Lightning Lessons

Practical skills & tools to accelerate your career

How Founders Should Lead Growth (Before Hiring)

Hosted by Sean Ellis

223 students

What you'll learn

Why delegating growth early fails

Understand why hiring too early stalls growth—and why only founders can turn early traction into a repeatable system.

Founder actions that unlock growth

Learn the key actions founders must take before delegating—like defining your success metric and aligning your team.

Your lightweight growth system

You’ll leave with a lightweight process to begin mapping what drives your growth—no growth expert required.

Why this topic matters

Most founders hit early growth challenges—and try to pawn them off on a Head of Growth. But without the right success metric or system, that hire is set up to fail. This lesson shows why founders must lead growth first—and how to build real momentum without wasting time, money, or trust. You’ll leave with a founder-tested framework you can use immediately.

You'll learn from

Sean Ellis

Founding team at LogMeIn (acquired for $4.3B) & author of Hacking Growth

I led early growth at Dropbox and was on the founding team at LogMeIn, where we built the system that eventually led to a $4.3B acquisition. I also coauthored Hacking Growth, which has sold over 750,000 copies and is used by teams at companies like TikTok, Microsoft, and Facebook.

But my favorite work is helping founders. Over the last decade, I’ve coached dozens of startup teams through the messy transition from product-market fit to repeatable growth. I’ve seen where things break—and what actually works.

In this session, I’ll help you avoid one of the most common and costly mistakes I see founders make: handing off growth too early. You’ll leave with clearer thinking, founder-tested next steps, and a better sense of what it takes to lead early growth.

Previously at