# From 4 to 120 people in 9 months, with zero outside funding > How we scaled MLG Blockchain fully remote, without raising a dollar. The hiring pipeline, the onboarding system, the operating cadence, and what I would do differently today. URL: https://regenerate.capital/insights/mlg-4-to-120/ Language: en · Other language: https://regenerate.capital/fr/analyses/mlg-4-to-120/index.md Publisher: Regenerate Capital (https://regenerate.capital) · Updated: 2026-09-25 --- [Home](https://regenerate.capital/) / [Insights](https://regenerate.capital/insights/) Playbook · 6 min read # From 4 to 120 people in 9 months, with zero outside funding How we scaled MLG Blockchain fully remote, without raising a dollar. The hiring pipeline, the onboarding system, the operating cadence, and what I would do differently today. Joaquim Miro · 2026-09-25 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. Subscribe ## Get the next note. Work with the studio ## Building something worth growing? Tell us what you’re building and what you need. We read every application, and every founder gets an answer. [Apply to work together](https://regenerate.capital/apply/)