Critical 0–1 → 1–2 Shifts For Start up Growth
I had a great conversation recently with a new friend I met through Friends of Next Play (as an aside, this is startup community very much worth checking out if you’re looking for what’s next, early stage). He’s a founder, and we were talking about my experience as an operator who’s worked from seed through growth, and into acquisition and public-company readiness, and what I’m seeing now in my work with leaders across industrial tech, high-growth consumer brands, fintech, and VC-backed firms I coach and advise.
There are gaps that consistently emerge as companies move from 0–1 to 1–2, or seed->A/B. This is the phase where growth outpaces structure, systems, leadership capability, and customer experience/quality.
Data shows this clearly: ~15–17 % of seed-funded startups progress to Series A within ~2 years, a rate significantly lower than historical cohorts. Operational, leadership, and customer/quality gaps that emerge moving from 0–1 to 1–2 are missed until they become costly, reactive fixes — precisely as this period of time where investors are interested in sustainable growth, vs. growth at all costs as in years past.
These challenges are a natural part of the transition and are far easier—and far less costly—to address proactively than to untangle later as runway tightens.
Decision-making quality, prioritization, & focus
At 0–1, speed and survival shape how decisions get made. Teams focus on the most immediate fires, goals shift frequently, and people move fluidly between priorities. There’s a lot of doing, testing, and iterating. With a small headcount, the constant context-switching, while intense, can feel manageable. As companies move into 1–2, the environment changes. There’s more data, more signal, AND more at stake. Decisions now benefit from sequencing and clearer tradeoffs. Decisions have longer term effects. When those don’t evolve alongside growth, teams can end up running too many initiatives in parallel, ownership becomes unclear, work stretches longer than expected, and execution loses momentum.
Resilience & leadership capacity
As companies move from 0–1 to 1–2, strong ICs are often asked to lead people or own initiatives, not just execute, or they’re starting to get bored. That shift requires new skills for everyone — delegation, expectation-setting, decision ownership, feedback, talent development, and managing interpersonal dynamics. Many leaders and first time founders haven’t had the space or support to build those muscles.
At the same time, LT intensity can leave teams with low capacity and little margin. As the company grows, leadership capability needs to expand as well, with more emphasis on emotional regulation, well being as strategy, prioritization, and making thoughtful people decisions.
This is also the stage where experience navigating scale, complexity, and adversity is critical. Bringing in people who have been through this phase before , and supporting existing leaders as they grow into it, helps the organization stay resilient as growth accelerates. This phase is a mental/emo/physical marathon.
Culture, change & resistance
Growth forces an identity shift for everyone. As roles, structure, and processes change, people fear losing connection to the original leadership team or the version of the company they joined. Concerns about losing the culture, losing creativity with too much structure, and “I don’t do politics” come up, are very common, and usually reflect fear of lost agency, impact, job security/relevance, misalignment of values, or just yet to be developed skills. These reactions are all very human, because change can be destabilizing.
This is also the stage where the organization itself is redesigned for scale, so functions evolve, roles are redefined, and early ICs who were promoted quickly are asked to step into narrower scope, different responsibilities, or in some cases, different roles.
When this transition isn’t explicitly named and led, fear shows up as resistance, disengagement, or attrition, particularly when new leaders are introduced.
Founders experience this all too. Moving through it well requires letting go, and modeling the change being asked of others.
The pace and sequencing of all this change needs to be intentional and methodical— with experienced, high EQ, scale-oriented people leaders to keep momentum going.
Talent & accountability
At seed, we often say “think like an owner.” That mindset builds personal initiative and scrappiness; psychological ownership. At 1–2, the shift is to structural, outcome ownership. Roles now require functional accountability, accountability for specific results, clear decision rights, and people leadership — including hiring, performance management, delegation, and ownership of team outcomes over time.
To support that shift, strong ICs moving into leadership roles need clarity, coaching, support, and authority. Expectations must be explicit, decision rights clearly defined, and ownership clear, so work can move without constant escalation or intervention. This is also the phase where leaders have to assess role fit honestly — not all talent that worked in the earlier stage will map cleanly to what the business now requires, and delaying those conversations slows growth.
Clarity & cver communication
Founder proximity, informal communication, and same-room decisions stop working at this stage. Communication has to be explicit, repeated, and reinforced. When priorities, ownership, decision rationale, changes, goals, and success criteria aren’t communicated clearly and consistently, people hesitate, morale drops, ownership blurs, and execution slows.
This stage requires a shift in how leaders communicate. Fewer one-off decisions and fewer skip-level escalations. More deliberate communication of vision, goals, priorities, and updates at every level of the organization. Communication needs strategy and planning, and it becomes a substantial part of the work.
Leaders have to consistently ask and answer: why are we doing this, who owns it, how will we measure success, where are decisions made, who is impacted, and what will they care about…then communicate it over and over.