In early 2016, MLG Blockchain was four people with no funding and no playbook. Was blockchain consulting even a real business? I wore three hats at once as a co-founder: CMO, COO and Chief of Staff.
Nine months later, we were 120 people. By 2018, we were one of the top three web3 consulting houses in the world. We never raised a dollar of outside capital to get there.
I want to be honest about what that took, because the headline makes it sound cleaner than it was. Here is the playbook as it actually ran, and what I would change if I did it again today.
Why did we grow without raising?
We didn’t have a choice, and it turned out to be a gift. Every hire had to be paid for by revenue, so growth was tied to clients from day one. We closed more than $5M in consulting and growth deals, and that revenue funded the team.
No funding also meant no pressure to hire ahead of the work. Each new person existed because a client needed them. That discipline kept us honest about which roles really mattered.
How do you hire 100+ people in under a year?
Do the math first. Going from 4 to 120 in about 39 weeks means roughly three hires every week, for nine months straight. Instinct and a few coffees won’t get you there: you need a pipeline.
I personally recruited, interviewed, negotiated, signed, onboarded and trained more than 100 people across a dozen time zones. When it was needed, I also let people go and offboarded them. Here is what made that possible:
- We hired the leaders first. I built the org chart underneath myself: a COO, a Head of HR, a Head of Marketing, a Head of Ops, a Head of BD and a Head of Sales.
- We made inbound do the work. Our SEO put us at the top of Google for blockchain consulting, so clients and candidates found us instead of the other way round.
- We hired remote from day one. That opened a global talent pool when most of our competitors were still hiring locally.
Onboarding was the real product
This is the part I would underline twice. At remote hypergrowth scale, culture and onboarding are not nice-to-haves. They are the only thing that keeps the organization from falling apart.
We built a remote onboarding stack before remote was normal. It had three parts, and none of them were expensive:
- A structured one-month ramp, laid out as an onboarding chart in Asana. Every new hire knew what week one, two, three and four looked like.
- A buddy system. Every new person was paired with a tenured peer they could ask anything, without going through a manager.
- Slack as the office, with explicit channel norms. People knew where decisions lived, where questions went and what needed a reply.
When you add three people a week, the newest employees quickly outnumber the old ones. Without a written ramp and a buddy, the culture gets diluted within a quarter. With them, new hires learned the culture from the people who already carried it.
What kept a remote team moving?
We worked async by default. Updates were written, decisions were written, and meetings were for the things that truly needed a live conversation. That is the only way a team across a dozen time zones stays in sync without everyone living on calls.
Clear ownership mattered just as much. Each head owned a function and its numbers. My job moved from doing the work to building the people and systems that did it.
What would I do differently now?
A lot of the process I ran by hand would now run on AI agents. Screening, scheduling, reference follow-ups, onboarding checklists and weekly reporting are exactly the kind of work agents handle well today. A single operator could keep the same pipeline moving with a fraction of the admin.
I would also put HR foundations in place earlier. Contracts, compensation bands and a simple review cycle feel premature at ten people. At fifty, not having them is expensive.
And I would protect my own energy more deliberately. Hypergrowth rewards the founder who can still think clearly in month eight. Great companies need founders who last.
Where it went next
MLG Blockchain later merged with Secure Digital Markets to form GDA Capital. As Chief of Staff at SDM, I ran a version of the same playbook for a regulated business, as the team grew from 9 to 40. The lessons carried over almost untouched.
If you are about to hire your next ten people and want to pressure-test your pipeline or your onboarding, send me a note through the studio. I am happy to look at your plan and tell you where it will break first.
Onwards and upwards.
