Early CEO Handoff

A story about why Grammarly's founders hired a CEO early in the company's journey.

"We brought in a CEO in 2011 when we were around 20 employees. We were making good revenue and were profitable, but still very small. Both Alex (my cofounder) and I have a philosophy that everybody should be in their zone of genius, doing what they like and what they're good at. Neither of us was really experienced or passionate about scaling organizations.

That's what we were looking for from a CEO - teaching us and scaling the company. We realized that to do what we needed to do, we needed a lot of people. We needed a big company. The size wasn't a desired outcome in itself, it was a necessity because the goals were so big that you can't do it with 20 or 30 people.

The opportunity was big and we needed to scale, which pushed us to look for external expertise. We were able to avoid micromanaging partly out of necessity - there was just so much to do that if you micromanage, you get stuck and don't make progress. There was no time, resources, or energy to micromanage anybody. We had to divide and conquer to keep making progress."