The declining cost of starting a company has had profound changes on how startups are formed, how they operate, where they look to raise money, and how they grow and scale. As a result, many of the commonly-held beliefs around what startups should and should not do no longer apply. There are some truly amazing opportunities for founders who are willing to think differently and take advantage of this changing landscape.

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Dustin Lucien, COO
October 19, 2017
Lessons Learned from Scaling - &
continuing to scale – a Fintech Startup
If I knew then what I know now
Betterment

2. Betterment is the largest independent online
financial advisor.

3. What we got right.
Build the right foundations.

4. Technical Foundations
Build a monolith at the
beginning.
Move faster.
Defer distributed systems problems.
Promote “Full Stack” thinking.
Understand the business domain.
Decompose the monolith over time.

5. Technical Foundations
Build a monolith at the
beginning.
Move faster.
Defer distributed systems problems.
Promote “Full Stack” thinking.
Understand the business domain.
Decompose the monolith over time.

6. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.

7. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
As you specialize teams to your
business

8. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
As you specialize teams to your
business
Assign clear ownership for aspects
of the product, systems, and
processes that support that area of
the business

9. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
Always think “full stack”. Teams
should own everything they need to
solve a business problem.
Examples:
• Signup, Tenured
• 401k, Retail
Not:
• Frontend, Backend

10. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
Develops domain expertise –
business and systems

11. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
Develops domain expertise –
business and systems
Responsibility even after the last
project ships

12. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
Develops domain expertise –
business and systems
Responsibility even after the last
project ships
Redundancy where you need it most

13. Team Foundations
Create areas of ownership.
Develops domain expertise –
business and systems
Responsibility even after the last
project ships
Redundancy where you need it most
Align company goals and career
growth to these teams

14. Team Foundations + Technical Foundations
Leverage Conway’s Law

15. Team Foundations + Technical Foundations
Leverage Conway’s Law
"organizations which design systems
are constrained to produce designs
which are copies of the
communication structures of these
organizations."

16. Team Foundations + Technical Foundations
Leverage Conway’s Law
…to guide and drive how you
specialize your monolith

17. Team Foundations + Technical Foundations
Leverage Conway’s Law
Pros:
• Align teams to business needs
first, not technical structures
Cons:
• You’ll be eating your monolith for a
long time. Vision, commitment.
• Beware silos. Strong culture of the
whole is greater than any part

18. What we got wrong.
Learn to love iteration.

19. Scaling Technology
Betterment 1.0
Collocated iron
Custom setup & configs
Flex frontend…then a Backbone
replacement
Customized Wordpress install
that wouldn’t run anywhere else

20. Scaling Technology
Betterment 1.0
Everything was a work of art!

21. Scaling Technology
Don’t spend time building
what doesn’t differentiate.
Instead:
• Focus your energy on building
technology that maximizes your
business differentiation

22. Scaling Technology
Don’t spend time building
what doesn’t differentiate.
Instead:
• Focus your energy on building
technology that maximizes your
business differentiation
• Set a principal to rely on
generalized, repeatable patterns

23. Scaling Technology
Don’t spend time building
what doesn’t differentiate.
Instead:
• Focus your energy on building
technology that maximizes your
business differentiation
• Set a principal to rely on
generalized, repeatable patterns
• And frameworks that take as much
off your plate as possible

24. Scaling Teams

25. Scaling Teams
You’ll have success.
Your team will grow.
10,
20,
100,
then 200.

26. Scaling Teams
You’ll need a way to align
your company to your
strategy
To provide the right
context for the decisions
made daily

27. Scaling Teams
If you’re like most, you’ll
choose OKR’s.
Or something similar.
Because you read the
same blog posts we all did.

28. Scaling Teams
So did we

29. Scaling Teams
It didn’t work out well the
first time.

30. Scaling Teams
It didn’t work out well the
first time.
Or the second.

31. Scaling Teams
It didn’t work out well the
first time.
Or the second.
Or the third.

32. Scaling Teams
You still have to be good at
telling the story
• Focus on the vision, and tell the
story. No framework will ever
inspire.

33. Scaling Teams
You still have to be good at
telling the story
• Focus on the vision, and tell the
story. No framework will ever
inspire.
• You’re not Amazon or Google yet.
Don’t blindly apply big company
processes.

34. Scaling Teams
You still have to be good at
telling the story
• Focus on the vision, and tell the
story. No framework will every
inspire.
• You’re not Amazon or Google yet.
Don’t blindly apply big company
processes.
• Develop a mechanism for
understanding when change is
needed

35. Scaling Teams
Aligned teams require
shared context.
We still rely on OKR’s to set measurable
objectives.
But we’ve built supporting processes to
develop shared understanding of the
business context informing our strategy.

36. https://www.betterment.com/