Building a $6B Software Company - Klaviyo’s Uncharted Path
EP 101 of The Logan Bartlett Show: Untold stories from tech's inner circle
Before Andrew Bialecki took Klaviyo public and scaled the company to $6B, he bootstrapped it to over $1M in ARR. In our discussion, Andrew reveals how Klaviyo develops internal entrepreneurship, sharing how they…
- identify talent with a zero-to-one mindset
- train employees through Klaviyo University
- support small, startup-like teams
Click here to view the episode transcript | Watch on Youtube | Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
✉️ Episode Memo
→ Hiring Entrepreneurial People
Andrew prioritizes hiring curious, problem-solving individuals who take ownership. In interviews, he starts by exploring a candidate's journey from the beginning of their career - right after college - to get a comprehensive understanding of their past behaviors and skills. This provides more context than focusing solely on recent experience, which might represent less than 10% of a person's life.
→ Promoting Intrapreneurship
Klaviyo fosters a startup-like culture by enabling employees to launch new projects, almost as mini-startups, within the company. These teams operate autonomously, with periodic reviews based on core metrics, and each team’s P&L is made visible internally. By allowing employees to sink or swim, the approach creates a sense of motivation and fast-paced innovative culture.
→ Klaviyo University
Since employees should be invested in learning, Klaviyo provides the resources. Klaviyo started with a free-book policy and has since escalated to a full blown course catalog of core classes and electives. Every employee completes two key training sessions: one class focuses on understanding Klaviyo's users, and a writing class breaks down business jargon and reinforces effective and clear communication. Klaviyo University now offers a growing selection of electives, enabling employees to explore their interests—from machine learning to marketing—while gaining skills to level up their work.
On top of Klaviyo’s pursuit to build up entrepreneurial talent internally, Klaviyo prioritizes a “eat your vegetables” philosophy. They celebrate things that suck and dive in to fix hard problems fast instead of pushing them off for later after the cool stuff gets addressed. They also take on a ship-quick mentality, as teams that do the highest quality work often launch things and get feedback most frequently.
More stories from Klaviyo’s growth + insights on building culture in the full episode.
⭐ Trailer
📱 Follow The Show!
If this was helpful to you, please consider forwarding!