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Merritt: Overhiring Leads to Boredom and Drama at Early Startups

Chris Merritt · Lessons Learned in Scaling Your Team & Revenue from $1M ARR to $1B+ | Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt · Mar 1, 2023 · at 7:29

Cloudflare CRO Chris Merritt discusses capacity planning and head-count management during the sub-$50M ARR phase.

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“If you get too many people sitting around with not enough work, they get bored and that's where the drama starts. So as I think about like the call to action here is I would rather have a little bit more demand being asked Asking people to do a little bit more than maybe the capacity model suggests, and be a little bit under capacity.”

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