Ask HN: Tips on managing rapid growth in your company?
A lot of the focus in HN seems to be about how to get an idea to the initial start-up phase.  But what tips to people have about the awkward adolescence stage of a company; you've found a successful market for a product, you're hiring lots of new people, and you're looking to expand to new revenue streams.  All sorts of challenges start to pop-up and I'm very curious how others handle them.  Some examples:<p>* How do you handle organizing the company into effective teams and projects with competing goals of growing revenue in existing products and establishing newer (though riskier) product development efforts?<p>* As more people come in, how do you best get them started, introduce them to corporate culture?<p>* Longer term employees often have a serious lack of people management skills; as you bring in new people with those skills, how do you start to build a management strength in a company?<p>* When is the ideal time to establish performance reviews?  They have their ups and downs; it seems like a good idea but the incentive structure has to be carefully thought through.<p>* New product development doesn't always work out in an unproven or competitive market (yes, we should all be following Steve Blank here).  That said, there's a constant tension between driving existing revenues and establishing new revenue sources; and the shifts often have a lot of impact on what people are focusing on.  Too many shifts can be disruptive to morale.  What techniques can be used to balance these?<p>In general, I'd love to hear from other people who worked at places that went from a dozen or so employees to a couple hundred or more and have stories about what did and didn't work.