The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale

You've worked with many very high performing Founder CEOs, Zuck, Cheryl, Sandberg, Larry and Sergey Google, Bret Taylor. Google, when I was there, felt like two PhD students paradise. Facebook felt like 19 year old hacker's dorm room. 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help our Articulate the culture that they're creating. When a lot of people think Molly Graham, a lot of people think of giving away your Legos. You have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage. Both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos. Sarah Caldwell, she told me that the framework that helped her most. In her career is something that you call the J curve versus stairs. So Chamoth, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a boiteboard. He said, The way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. Just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years. But that is boring. The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs. And you do fall, but then you climb. I'm out, way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.

Today my guest is Molly Graham. Molly was an early employee at Google, also at Facebook, where she worked closely with Zuck on building the Jan Zuckerberg Initiative. She also worked with Brett Taylor on scaling Quip, which he sold a salesforce. She's also worked with hundreds of companies and founders, helping them grow into the leaders that they want to become. Today she leads Glue Club, which is a community for leaders operating in changing, growing environments who want to develop themselves as quickly as their companies. Molly is maybe most known for her advice to give away your Legos.

Which we chat about, along with basically all of her favorite frameworks and mindsets and pieces of advice that she's developed and collected over time for leaders who are going through rapid scale and growth and are just struggling to keep up. I think of this episode as a high growth handbook for leaders who are experiencing rapid scale. We cover the J Curves versus Stairs approach to career growth, the waterline model, and why you want to snorkel before you scuba. Her six rules for creating goals and building alignment, her rules of thumb for dealing with rapid scale and lots of change. The biggest lessons she's learned from Zuck and Sergey and Larry and Cheryl and Bret Taylor and so much more, Molly is incredible, and you will be a better leader after listening to this episode. A huge thank you to Eric Antonow, Ashley Murphy, and Sarah Caldwell for suggesting topic and questions for this conversation.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.