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

It's another episode of startups with the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling. And this week, I talked to Yanev Bernstein, who has been both a founder and an executive at companies ranging from small startups up to very large orgs, including ten years at Google. He's been a VP of engineering. He's been a COO. He's been a consultant, and he was a software engineering leader at Google. And these days, he's been giving advice to founders that wanna go from startup to scale up. He's seen a lot of companies fail as many of us do as they try to get past that 1,000,000, 5,000,000, 10,000,000 ARR phase. And one of the big drags on a company as it grows is when a founder isn't able to make that transition from being the CEO of a ten, twenty person company up into the fifty, hundred, 200 person company. And that's what we focus on today as we talk about going from scrappy to scalable, what it looks like to evolve your role as a founder as your company gets bigger. And speaking of growing your company, I run a premium coaching program called the SAS Institute. SAS Institute is a private coaching community designed for b to b and b to c SaaS founders doing a million in ARR or more. There's one on one coaching. There are masterminds, and there is an amazing online community that we'll be meeting in person. The idea is to get you the systems and the support you need to scale from a million or more up into the $10.15, and $20,000,000 marks. We have some incredible coaches including Jordan Gall, Taylor Hendrickson, and Mark Thomas. And our first group is very small, and that's amazing because you get a lot of one on one attention. In addition, you get to chat with me and get my best advice. Sassinstitute.com. We'd love to have you. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Yaniv. Yaniv Bernstein. Thanks for joining me on Startups for the Rest, Wes. Thanks, Rob. I'm really excited to be on. Yeah. It's been a long time coming. I was on your podcast that you cohost called The Startup Podcast, creatively named. I was on that a couple years ago, and I think we're we're talking about recording another episode soon. So folks can go check out, certainly go check out that episode if they wanna hear us. We talked a lot about, like, bootstrapping versus raising funding, I think. That's the one. And you have been a founder. You've been a COO. You've been, I believe, a VP of engineering. You have been a coach, adviser, and investor of a lot of startups. So you have quite a quite the gamut of experience. Did I miss anything? Yeah. Well, the first ten years of my career, I was a software engineer at Google. So I started off at Big Tech, and I think over the course of …