10 Questions Every Founder Should Ask Before Scaling | Tabs, Ali Hussain
In a Nutshell
Scaling requires deliberate preparation before acceleration—founders must deeply understand the problem space through first-principles research, establish a core product wedge, and assemble a diverse founding team of 8-10 people who don't mirror the founder. The CEO role evolves from hands-on execution to strategic leadership focused on short-term customer impact and data-driven KPIs, while embracing AI mandates across functions and betting on internal talent with belief, optimism, and strategic perspective.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
In order to grow, sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There are a few things that need to be in place, and while getting the right pieces together can be very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster.
Number one is just understanding the space you want to go after. For Tabs, it was finance and accounting. Ali Hussain's first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you want to do that?" The decision was influenced by facing that problem personally and seeing the success of other companies around vendor management in finance, including companies like Zip, Ramp, and Koopa. Overnight, dozens of unicorns were formed, leading to the realization that this was not a boring problem or a small business opportunity. This allowed Tabs to pursue the revenue opportunity.
Before scaling, there should be a core product that is not just services. It is acceptable to have services in perpetuity, but there needs to be a core that is being sold and deployed as a wedge to every company.
Ali Hussain is the co-founder and CEO of Tabs. Tabs is building AI and agents for finance and accounting. The core problem Tabs helps partners solve is making their complex revenue more simple at scale.
Ali was previously the CLOO at Latch, where the team grew to over 500 people with fast growth. At one point, one in ten new apartments was going up with their products.
When the team starts to scale beyond 30 to 50 people—at Tabs they are now 150 plus people—meetings occur where people are not seen for even a month at a time. This inflection point becomes a different beast.
When Ali joined Latch, it was a hungry and young team with less than 10 people. For many, it was their first time out of college being in a startup. There was a level of aptitude and slope that allowed unreasonable things to be done to build and scale very fast, driven by belief.
The realization that things were really working came when a new warehouse was opened. Walking through it revealed not 20 locks, but tens of thousands of locks or thousands of locks being ready to ship. The operation had grown such that tens of thousands of users were going to experience the product throughout the country. This was a turning point.
Things that kept Ali up at night included what happens in the middle—how the product would actually be deployed and implemented. Experiences from Latch, which involved a very complex product deployment in apartment buildings where thousands of families lived, forced building that muscle early in the career.
In one high-profile building with 500 residents, the locks stopped working at 11:00 p.m. and people were locked out. Getting calls from the property manager about not getting access into the building is incredibly high stress. These are the types of situations when dealing with mission-critical workflows that are not nice-to-haves.
One of the playbooks from Latch that was very important and reflected on a lot before starting Tabs was that in order to grow, sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There are a few things that need to be in place, and while getting the right pieces together can be very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster.
Ali has always been very first-principles in thinking, trying to understand root problems and having empathy on what the core challenge is. This resulted in how Tabs was started—not by writing software and trying to solution right away, but by spending almost 6 months talking to hundreds if not close to a thousand finance professionals to understand the root of where the most pain was today.
Often when people think of the most boring problems, there is the least investment already in it, but it is often the area where the most spend goes into. The first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you want to do that?" The motivation came from facing that problem personally, which drives building something much better. Seeing the success of companies like Zip, Ramp, and Koopa around vendor management in finance showed how advanced some of that tooling had become and how generally left behind finance and accounting technology had become. Overnight, dozens of unicorns were formed. This led to the realization that this was not that boring of a problem or that small of a business opportunity, which allowed going after the revenue opportunity at Tabs.
Beyond just starting to build, pattern matching around who the initial customer profile will be is highly encouraged. Understanding who you are actually selling to and why is just as important as the product being built, because it may be realized that it is a really tough customer with only a very narrow set of people willing to buy.
A lot of effort went into trying to understand from any founder how much ICP work they have done, because though moving slow and making some mistakes, it has allowed unlocking the market much faster in the early stages.
Just savor the moment—the early days are often some of the most fun. There is often a view that the company will never get to a million in revenue or scale to a certain level of brand presence. That moment, if the right things are done, comes a lot faster than realized. It has been incredible to be part of this journey so quickly with some amazing human beings. Looking back, the early moment would have been savored more because it is really special, and a lot in day-to-day changes when becoming a large company where the organization must be further functionalized, governance established, etc.
Speed does not come from moving fast; it comes from being ready before you start.
Before the main interview, a pre-in call is always done and Granola quietly transcribes it in the background. No bot ever joins, turning it into clean notes. A recipe was built for this called interview prep. The prompt was written once with everything wanted before a shoot, and now it is one click every time. Minutes before the cameras roll, it is run on that pre-in call. In seconds, it surfaces the story worth telling, the threads worth pulling, and the questions worth asking. It is like having the whole transcript in your head without ever opening it. The team sits down already knowing where it should go. It is not a generic checklist—every line is drawn from the real discussion just had, shaped by exactly how prep is liked. Less time scrambling to remember, more time fully present in the room.
It is really important whether with a co-founder or founding team to get the right pieces of the puzzle together. Building a startup is incredibly lonely. What is not realized is the number of people when early that are compounding the velocity in which they can move if they are part of the very early journey, which is incredibly helpful.
For the first 10 employees, skill sets and diversity need to be augmented that the founder does not have. It is incredibly important if technical to find someone who is very sales-oriented or very operational. The number one litmus test is that the first 8 to 10 employees should certainly not look like the founder or behave like the founder—diversity of thought and skill set is incredibly important. Those mixtures together can pull together a really good founding team.
From the beginning, Ali has been very vocal that the place and space built together is going to set the trajectory of the company. Though it may be easy to hire people remote or in different cities or markets, getting that initial 10 people together, whether in New York or SF, is incredibly important and cannot be encouraged enough when starting a company.
One way to really understand if someone will make a good manager, even if they have not managed people at the company, is to bet on people and not give them 100% managerial responsibility out of the gate, but make them pod leads. They get set up for success in that environment, and if they can crush it over a 3-month or six-month period, the farm will be bet behind them.
There will always be a bet on someone internal to take roles in leadership rather than always going outside to hire. People internally understand the product the best, the culture, the processes.
The types of people who can succeed at a successful startup environment obviously come in with incredible work ethic and have the acumen to evolve and continue to uplevel their skill set, whether they have it from the day they start or as they go through the evolutionary journey.
Two things further define leaders from those who succeed and those who do not: one is belief and optimism. If wanting to grow from being an IC to one day running an ops function or a sales function, there must be both belief in oneself but also belief in the company. That is incredibly contagious. The second is some type of perspective that is strategic that could change the course of the entire company.
If someone comes in and believes that the CEO or the founders have all the answers and just sits waiting to be told what success looks like, it is incredibly hard to shine. But if someone comes in with strong perspectives and brings that to leadership saying they believe if this is changed about the implementation approach or this way in how the product is thought about in the market—even if wrong—that conviction that amplifies is incredibly powerful. Those types of thinkers are incredibly priceless and are what is going to drive the direction of the company over the next 2 to 5 years. There will always be an effort to keep them as long as possible and ideally in a place of leadership or deeper strategic thinking within the business.
When being a CEO, there is the opportunity to go very wide and look at a bunch of different parts of the business. In the early days, everything is being done—selling, handling customer support tickets, success, operations, even marketing. Hands are tied to all of them in some ways.
There becomes a phase later where there is still deep involvement in some functions, but hiring or working with people who are specialized in their domain begins. In the later phase, the role just changes a little bit. Particularly when hiring amazing people, the role almost shrinks and goes back full cycle. That is not a bad thing—if able to bring on amazing people, there is a tendency to almost become redundant over the phases of the business.
The reality of trying to build and translate knowledge in the early days is a very hard thing in a startup because everyone is running around reactively and the ability to document everything and have the perfect kind of onboarding and enablement is just really hard. Even at 150 plus people today, it is not perfect, and it is one of the hardest muscles to build. There is a lot of belief in direct mentorship and teaching while showing.
One thing always been comfortable with is hiring really good people. Sometimes they may not have the perfect domain knowledge, but in the early days making sure they are getting that tutelage via the founder or founding team, and knowing that if they can just run that muscle through learning through leadership, they can then become the right way to cascade that. Some of the best mentors and teachers at the company learned through the founder or through a co-founder, and via that have been able to cascade that domain knowledge, and they are the best trainers and stewards of enablement within the company.
From an operating principle standpoint, being very data-driven is important. Each team has KPIs that are very important. Every team has two or three metrics that are must-focus and must have a path to. As companies grow, there is more risk of getting distracted by way too many things. It is really important to lay down where each team needs to be hyper-prioritized.
One thing often done, if not monthly, certainly quarterly, is talking to each report and doing a sense check of where time is being spent and ensuring that aligns with what is believed to be the most impact that can be driven for the company.
Less time is spent on the what and the how—meaning the strategy to get there. If needing to hit a certain metric, not being in the weeds trying to figure out exactly where marketing spends their dollars to get to pipeline or which are the specific features in payments or billing that the product team is working on. That is deferred to people who are smarter on it, more on the ground, and have the domain knowledge that is not had in every part of the business. Work must be done with people who are far more intelligent and have the knowledge to execute on that strategy.
On the other hand, when it comes to strategy or setting direction, the leader must be decisive and consistent. They cannot reinvent the wheel every couple weeks. They cannot be stalled by decision fatigue. They must drive mandates and then rally the org behind that.
When scaling, there is often a want to get more long-term planning and a belief that having scaled means needing to be thinking 12 months out. For a fast-growing company, that is just really hard. At the end of the day, the roadmap in what is built has to be a culmination of what is the highest impact for customers, where product-market fit is being found, but also where the technology is moving. Thinking long-term can often be a great disadvantage strategically and competitively. There has been a lot more comfort with embracing the uncertainty in the longer term while making sure all calories go into being incredibly flexible and focused on driving the most impact for customers in the short term.
AI is going to require and change the way companies are built, sold, and operated, and there are pretty significant AI mandates across every function. It is allowing each team to build in ways they otherwise may rely on engineering or have access to things they can build or democratize which they may not otherwise have had the skill set to do.
For example, most of the post-sales team has the ability to connect into the product and build on top to drive value for merchants or make parts of their job more efficient than they otherwise would be able to. There has been amazement by people in marketing or support. It has provided a democratization of tools where they can get access to automation or tooling. These are some of the ways it is not even hardware or software—it is the different functions that have been able to do a lot more or move faster with AI access at their fingertips.
In today's world, having the right clarity of mind of what differentiates versus things that can be built more easily with just AI tooling like Claude, and having a strong perspective of what makes inevitable and defensible, is incredibly important. Go touch the metal, go build hard things, and do not shy away from that. If done with a ton of conviction, there will be incredible success.
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