【A Must-Read for Startups】The Critical Pivot from 1 to 10: How Founders Evolve from Top Performers to Team Accelerators

In the early days of a startup, a founder’s versatility is the single key to survival. At that stage, you are the strongest product manager, the most capable salesperson, and the one replying to customer service emails at midnight. This "hero-style" leadership pushes the company through the barren 0-to-1 phase and successfully validates Product-Market Fit (PMF).

However, once the company enters the 1-to-10 scaling phase, the very strengths you once took pride in can transform overnight into fatal weaknesses: the harder you grind, the slower the company moves.

The brutal reason? You have become the biggest bottleneck to organizational growth.

What’s even more brutal is that many founders believe the solution is simply to "hire better people." In reality, that approach often yields the opposite result.

The Founder’s Evolution: From Doer to Architect — But Never "Disappear"

In the 0-to-1 stage, you are the single point of leverage holding everything up. In the 1-to-10 stage, your core value must shift toward system design.

Many founders understand they must transition from being a Doer to becoming an Architect of the organization. But they often mistake this for stepping completely into the background and letting "the professionals" handle everything. This is an extremely dangerous misconception.

At the 1-to-10 stage, company systems are usually still in a semi-formed state:

• Culture is not yet fully shaped.

• Decision-making mechanisms are immature.

• The moat of core competitiveness is still under construction.

  
  

This is not the time for a founder to exit the battlefield. Instead, it is the time to stand at the center of it — in a different way.

You still charge forward, but no longer by fighting every battle yourself. Instead, you ensure the formation holds. You still lead the team, but the focus is no longer on execution details — it is on safeguarding the quality and speed of decisions.

This is a delicate dynamic balance: letting the system run on its own while remaining ready to "recalibrate" at critical inflection points.

The Talent Strategy Trap: Prestige Is No Antidote to Chaos

In the rush to scale, founders often fall into the trap of "prestige worship":

• A bias toward candidates with only big-company backgrounds.

• Resumes defined by elite degrees.

• Hiring based solely on well-known C-level titles.

  
  

However, professionals accustomed to maintaining mature systems and abundant resources may react poorly to the chaos of the 1-to-10 stage. What truly determines success in scaling is not the strength of a résumé, but whether the person possesses a Co-founding Mindset.

What Is a "Co-founding Mindset"?

At the 1-to-10 stage, you don’t need a "professional manager." You need a partner-type builder.

People with this mindset typically demonstrate:

• High Ownership: They treat the company’s problems as their own.

• Comfort with Uncertainty: They find ways to create resources instead of waiting for them.

• A Drive to Create, Not Just Manage: They join to co-create something that reshapes industry rules.

  
  

Delegation Is Not Abdication: The Layers of CEO Empowerment

Many founders, in learning to let go, swing from micromanagement to the opposite extreme — abdication. After hiring strong talent, they stop engaging and aligning, causing the organization to drift.

True delegation is a layered transfer of authority:

Layer 1: Turn Intuition into a Logical Framework

If your decision criteria and risk assessments exist only in your head, you can never be replaced. You must articulate your thinking clearly: Under what circumstances do we take risks? What benchmarks are non-negotiable? When your intuition becomes a learnable logic framework, the team can make the "right" decisions even in your absence.

Layer 2: Allow Imperfect Execution

The essence of scaling is increasing the volume of output that is not personally produced by you. Once you have people with a Co-founding Mindset, you must give them room to make mistakes. As long as those mistakes are not existential, they are the "learning costs" the organization must pay.

Layer 3: Defend the CEO’s True Battlefield

Once you have successfully "killed" your involvement in daily functional work, you must pivot 100% of your focus to the CEO’s "Big Three":

1. Talent: Not just recruiting, but retaining and activating core partners who share a co-founder mentality.

2. Capital: Ensuring the company has sufficient runway and allocating resources toward the highest-leverage opportunities.

3. Vision: During the chaos of scaling, you must be the clearest and most unwavering person in the room.

   
   

Conclusion: Scaling Is an Upgrade of Leadership

From 1 to 10, what founders truly need to do is neither disappear nor continue being the strongest individual contributor. Instead, they must:

1. Retire the role of "myself as the only critical person."

2. Identify core partners with a co-founding mindset.

3. Master the dynamic balance between involvement and delegation.

   
   

The essence of scaling is not just system leverage — it is people leverage. When you enable a group of people to think like entrepreneurs, the company truly begins its ascent. At that moment, you are no longer the company’s biggest bottleneck — you become the accelerator that makes everyone else stronger.