10 Questions Every Founder Should Ask Before Scaling | Tabs, Ali Hussain

Granola is the AI notepad for professionals in back-to-back meetings. New users get 100% off their first month → https://granola.ai?via=KUzb8Nm Ali Hussain scaled Latch from a team of less than 10 to over 500 people. At one point, 1 in 10 new apartments in America was going up with their smart locks. He rode that growth all the way to a NASDAQ IPO. Then he started over. In 2023, he founded Tabs, building AI agents for finance and accounting teams. Three years later, Tabs has 150+ people, a $55M Series B led by Lightspeed, and 5x ARR growth in a single year, with customers like Cursor and Statsig. His scaling playbook sounds backwards: in order to grow, you have to go slow before you can go fast. In this interview, Ali answers the 10 questions every founder should face before scaling. 00:00 Intro 01:55 How did you learn to scale? 02:54 What was the hardest part of scaling? 03:53 How do you get ahead of the hard part? 07:23 Granola, the AI meeting assistant 08:35 How do you build a team that scales? 09:59 How do you grow leaders as your team scales? 12:21 How does your role change as you scale? 13:11 How do you scale what only the founders know? 14:28 How do you keep driving impact as the team grows? 16:14 What's the most common scaling mistake? 17:10 How is AI changing the way you scale? EO is a global media brand for builders. We tell the defining stories of founders shaping the future: people who see what others don’t and build what they believe in. Subscribe to EO: https://www.youtube.com/@eoglobal EO Magazine: https://www.eomag.io Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eostudio.official/ X: https://x.com/eostudi0 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eo-studio EO Studio: https://eo.team/ Business inquiries: partner@eoeoeo.net Build what you believe in.