Welcome to The Memo by Vecto. Today, we explore one of the first turning points in your startup’s growth: the part when you realise your kaccha road needs to be made into a pucca road.
This is also known as the ‘mechanics of scale’, when efficient systems and processes enable product and revenue growth.
Let’s dig in.
Every startup begins in the "garage band" phase. You have five people in a room, the hum of an AC, and a shared history. You likely went to college together or worked at the same firm before quitting to start this.
In this stage, a lack of process is a necessary advantage. Information flows through the air. You don’t write anything down because everyone hears the same conversations over coffee.
This telepathy is a high. It is why everything moves so fast.
But as you cross 50 or 100 people, the telepathy cracks. You see patterns: the confusion, the double-checking, the “I forgot to mention’s.”
As a founder, you wonder: Is our hiring failing, or have people simply stopped caring?
Case Study #1 — The coffee chat that cost a sprint
Consider ‘SlowFast’—a B2B SaaS startup that raised a Series A and grew from 15 to 85 people in six months.
In the early days, the team sat in a 2BHK in Indiranagar. They didn't need Jira; they had the vibe. If the founder negotiated vendor terms, everyone heard it.
Recently, the CEO promised a new client a custom integration during a late-night WhatsApp chat. He assumed the CTO was on board because they had a quick chat about it over filter coffee three days back.
The mechanics of failing fast and hard
The Product team (now 20 people) continued working on the old roadmap. They had no record of the coffee chat nor the WhatsApp message.
During the week, the CEO messaged the Lead Engineer: “Let’s prioritize that integration?” The engineer immediately pulled two devs off the core sprint to hero the fix.
The following week the platform crashed during a new client’s demo because the sidebar fix bypassed the QA process — which was never codified to begin with.
The new Sales Head was furious. The engineers were burnt out. The CEO and CTO thought the other guy was losing their grip on the business.
This is the Telepathy Bottleneck in action: the belief that instinct alone can enable scale.
Case Study #2 — The BBQ that sizzled out
I recently observed a lifestyle brand that launched events as a new revenue channel. They hired ‘Thor,’ a talented specialist known for hosting the best parties in town.
Thor operated on a private logic. He didn’t share plans or delegate. Documentation was a "vibe-killer" that slowed him down. The founders were relieved to have someone "own the problem” so they could focus on growth.
To celebrate a funding round, they planned a Sunset BBQ for their employees and loyal customers. On the morning of the event, Thor had a personal emergency and went unreachable (he’s okay now).
The rest of the team arrived early at the venue to find a total vacuum.
There was no list of vendors, no floor plans, and no record of payments.
The system was entirely inside Thor’s head, and the system was temporarily offline.
But, how hard can it be to host a BBQ for 200 people?
The team spent the afternoon in a high-friction hustle, decoding the event on the fly.
Guests started to arrive and the food & cocktails started flowing. Halfway through the party, the music stopped. In the scramble for charcoal, nobody had curated a playlist or checked on entertainment.
For the rest of the night, the party atmosphere was interrupted by loud, jarring ads for insurance and detergent.
There’s no nice way to say it: The party was lame and the unlimited drinks were a short-term band-aid for the lack of actual design.
To make things worse, the next day, there was no debrief because no one wanted to rock the boat.
Thor returned and moved on to the next event using the same private methods.
This is also the Telepathy Bottleneck: the belief that hiring talent replaces the need for shared systems.
To move from telepathy to systems, you don’t need to start with corporate handbooks. You need to identify where ambiguity repeats and name the pattern first.
Ask yourself these three critical questions today:
The Thor Test: In which parts of your company do plans exist only in private DMs or a single brain?
The Memory Check: If your core team disappeared for 24 hours, could a new hire find the info to do their job?
The Broken Tape-Recorder Loop: Are you spending more time repeating the same information in "quick catch-ups" than on growing company revenue?
If any of these questions reveal a roadblock, understand the specific friction point before deciding on an action.
Ideally, the next step isn't death by SOP. It is enabling shared visibility.
It is moving the "why" and “how” out of your head and into a confidential shared space so that speed can continue without constant intervention.
Worrying about the Right Things
Many startups believe they are protecting growth speed by avoiding structure. They worry that bringing in systems or rules will mean they’re losing their special spark.
I disagree. I know from lived experience: if you’re doing this you’re just protecting familiarity.
The familiarity of the “good ol’ days”.
The familiarity of the achievement adrenaline.
And the familiarity of hustling with familiar people.
All these are fine if you want things to be status quo. But if you’re reading this, then we both know you want to grow.
So instead of worrying about having or losing control, worry about the right things as you scale:
Worry about setting your teams up for success in the long run.
Worry about making knowledge available internally.
And worry about channeling your bandwidth so true speed is real and visible.
Once this distinction becomes clear, your mindset can shift from worrying to action: What needs to become clear for our speed to continue?
The answer shouldn’t surprise you. But it should definitely get you to act on it.
Before I sign off.
What is the biggest bottleneck in your current systems? Which of the three questions above hit home - was it the Thor test, the Memory check or the Tape-recorder trap?
Reply and let me know. I’d love to hear about the specific patterns you are seeing as you grow.
Until next time,
Shweta.