Scaling yourself during hypergrowth

When Julia Grace joined Slack 3 years ago, the company had fewer than 100 engineers. It’s now at more than 500, and her own team grew from 10 to 100 people in 2 years. Julia shares tips and stories from the leadership front lines as she learned how to rapidly scale herself and her leadership team during a period when her job was substantially changing every six months. About Julia Grace Julia loves solving challenging engineering problems at scale, growing businesses, and leading teams. She’s currently the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, having grown the team from 10 to 100+. She excels in high velocity environments especially during hyper growth: Slack engineering headcount grew from 100 to over 300 during her first 2 years, with her team growing 5x in size. She advises early and mid-stage startups, having extensive experience not only raising venture capital funding (including from top tier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz), and sold her previous company, Tindie, where she was the co-founder and CTO. She has also founded and sat on several advisory boards for startups and as well as large, multi-billion dollar non-profits. She holds a BS with Honors and MS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina where her research focused on operating systems, including building a distributed system that allowed peer-to-peer data sharing from internet browser caches in low connectivity. She is an avid athlete and former collegiate rower, always trying to squeeze a run in (including chasing her young daughter)!