What actually breaks as companies scale — operating models, sequencing, and when to bring in senior leadership — including the specific dynamics of dual-use and defense adjacent startups.
The hardest stage of growth is the one where chaos stops working but bureaucracy could kill you: too big to run on founder instinct, too small for ten layers of approval. The fix at every scale, from a dual-use startup choosing which market to serve first, to a company buying a new CRM to paper…
Startups rarely fail to scale because they lack tools, dashboards, or headcount. They fail because they fix problems in the wrong order, run an operating model built for ten people at a headcount of fifty, and wait too long to hire the one role — a COO — built to solve exactly this. Dual-use companies…
