Scaling through chaos shouldn't mean compromising on legal

Scaling through chaos shouldn't mean compromising on legal

By Ross McNairn, co-founder and CEO of Wordsmith

Scaling a startup is a chaotic, difficult experience. People and product dominate a founder’s attention, often to the detriment of the small print. By that I mean legal, a complex area with an overstated reputation among startups for being a cost sinkhole falls right into this category. Yet lack of legal oversight could have catastrophic results, especially as companies scale and deliver products and services faster than ever before. Just look at the CrowdStrike outage and the potential liability implications for the firm: it should stand as a lesson for all fast-scaling startups and founders that proper legal counsel is a must to safeguard your business.

Startups today are growing at an incredibly rapid pace. Between 2013 and 2020, it took high-performing startups just 6.1 years to reach 1,000 headcount, compared to 9.4 years between 2000 and 2012, as shown by data from Index Venture’s Scaling Through Chaos resource. AI is accelerating this too, and the result is greater complexity and a higher risk of something going wrong as each looks to become a first mover and lock out competitors.