Scale: Operating Beyond Founder Mode
with Lena Okafor — CEO, Halden · Former VP Operations, Airbnb
Scaling Without Losing the Company You Started
The transition from founder-led to founder-scaled is the moment most companies quietly stall. The instincts that built the first thirty hires become the bottleneck that blocks the next three hundred.
Lena Okafor draws on her work scaling Airbnb's operations and leading Halden through hypergrowth to teach how founders re-organize their own role — without losing the thing that made the company work in the first place.
Lena Okafor
Lena Okafor is the CEO of Halden and previously served as VP of Operations at Airbnb, where she led the scaling of host experience across 40 countries.
She has coached founder-CEOs through Series B to IPO and sits on the boards of three category-defining startups.
She writes Past Founder Mode, a newsletter on operating maturity in venture-backed companies.
Four outcomes you will leave with
- 01Identify the decisions only the founder should still be making — and the ones they should have handed off six months ago.
- 02Design an operating cadence that keeps speed without keeping chaos.
- 03Hire the first leadership team that genuinely takes work off the founder's plate.
- 04Build the rituals that protect product taste as the org crosses 100, 200, 300 people.
"Scaling is not about doing more as a founder. It is about being honest, every quarter, about what only you can still do."
Structure & Format
Downloadable Resources
