Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Elias Stahl’s framework for leadership team transition as one of the clearest articulations of the moment when a startup CEO must fundamentally change how they operate — or become the company’s primary constraint.
Stahl is the CEO and co-founder of Hilos, a company that has built a no-CAD 3D platform allowing footwear designers to go from design directly to manufacturable output without the traditional chain of specialists. Before founding Hilos in 2019, Stahl spent three years in Israeli Defense Forces Special Forces and holds a master’s in international economics and strategic studies from Johns Hopkins. He brought both of those experiences directly into how he builds and leads teams.
This episode is for CEOs who have hit the point where their company’s growth rate is outpacing their ability to be in every conversation — and who need a framework for letting go of the hub without losing the wheel.
Key Takeaways
- When a CEO remains the hub in a hub-and-spokes leadership model, they cap the company’s growth at exactly their own capacity — the ceiling is not the market, it is the CEO.
- The transition from hub-and-spokes to a domain-based leadership team requires a shift in the CEO’s role from making decisions to asking questions that lead others toward decisions.
- CEOs who publicly model vulnerability — naming their own weaknesses in one-on-ones and company-wide meetings — create the psychological safety that allows leadership teams to surface problems before they become crises.
- Hilos cut footwear sample production from three months to one day by centering AI adoption on designers’ stated need for control rather than efficiency — when AI removes the adversarial relationship between designers and specialist intermediaries, adoption accelerates and creative output improves.
- A CEO who separates their personal identity from the company’s identity takes bigger risks on the business and makes more effective long-term decisions because the outcomes are no longer personal threats.
How CEOs Can Break the Hub-and-Spokes Model Before It Breaks the Company
The framework Stahl operates from is explicit: when a company grows 4x per year, every person in the company — starting with the CEO — must grow 4x per year. The CEO is the ceiling. When the CEO stops growing, the company growth rate converges toward zero.
“You are the cap on the company’s growth,” Stahl told Gow. “And so my job is to make sure that none of us stop growing. And when anyone comes into Hilos, I say, the company will grow and your job is to grow faster than the company — and you decide when that stops.”
Every new hire at Hilos enters the company with that expectation made explicit. There is no finish line. The question is not whether someone will grow, but how fast and for how long.
The problem Stahl names is structural, not personal. In the early stage, the hub-and-spokes model works because the CEO knows everything, can flip between any conversation, and is the motivating energy behind every decision. Stahl describes loving that period: “I could get into the smallest technical detail with the highest level conversation. I love that. I loved being able to bat back and forth. I love channel flipping.” The issue is that model does not scale. The CEO cannot remain the routing node for every domain as the company grows. The routing node becomes the bottleneck.
The transition to a true leadership team — where each leader manages a domain independently — is the moment Stahl compares to sending a child to college. The relationship changes. The CEO stops managing and starts leading. The CEO stops making decisions and starts coaching people toward decisions. The tools are different: instead of direction, questions. Instead of answers, frameworks.
That transition is not automatic. Stahl credits two practices at Hilos for making it work.
The first is surrounding himself early with leaders who had already made that transition. He built relationships with 26- and 30-year veterans from the footwear industry — people who had led brands like Nike when it was still small enough that a single person might be sent to open an entire country’s operations. Their experience gave Stahl a model for what mature leadership looks like in practice, not in theory.
The second practice is the two mantras Hilos operates under. The first is growth through vulnerability. The second is you are never done growing. Both are lived at the CEO level first. Neither is a values statement on a wall.
How CEOs Can Model Vulnerability to Build Leadership Teams That Surface Problems Early
Stahl describes vulnerability not as a personality trait but as a deliberate communication strategy — one he applies in one-on-ones, in team meetings, and in company-wide moments when a strategic direction has to change.
His starting point is personal self-disclosure about his own known weaknesses. “It’s harder for me to give praise. It’s harder for me to talk about the good work people are doing. I’m much more demanding and talking about what I want to see.” Rather than hiding that tendency, he names it directly in one-on-ones before delivering critical feedback. That disclosure does two things: it checks his own behavior in the moment, and it makes the person on the other side of the conversation feel seen before they receive a challenge.
When the stakes are higher — a company-wide strategic change — Stahl uses the same principle at scale. He describes standing in front of the full company and saying: “I thought that this would work. I thought this was the highest priority. I now received this information. It’s different. And I think that was the right decision at the time, but I don’t think it’s the right decision now. I think I was wrong and we need to change.”
The mechanism Stahl names matters. He does not just admit the mistake. He walks the company through the line of reasoning that produced the original decision and the new information that changed it. That transparency prevents the experience of being jerked around. The team can follow the logic, which means they can trust the next change when it comes.
Gow named the same behavior from his own CEO experience: willingness to fall on your sword — to acknowledge a wrong direction publicly — builds loyalty precisely because it signals the CEO is human and honest, not infallible. When people trust that mistakes will be named rather than defended, they surface their own problems earlier. That is the organizational payoff of vulnerability at scale.
How CEOs Can Use AI to Accelerate Creative Output Without Triggering Team Resistance
Stahl’s second domain — and the one where Hilos has produced the most measurable results — is the use of AI and machine learning to restructure the relationship between design and manufacturing in footwear.
The traditional footwear production chain is a sequence of specialists: designer, 3D modeler, developer, engineer. Each specialist acts as a filter, translating design intent into manufacturable constraints and sending the work back with edits. The result is a sample production cycle measured in months. Designers experience the chain as adversarial — a series of people telling them what they cannot do.
Stahl uses the no-code web development analogy to explain what Hilos is building: “Anytime you wanted to build a website 20 years ago, you would have a designer design a beautiful, amazing website and go to a web developer, and the web developer would say, I can do 40% of this. It will take twice as long. Let’s change this back and forth. Then no code web development applications came out and the designers were able to design beautiful websites themselves. And the developers didn’t go away. They focused on building better tools for designers to use. Instead of the developer being a stop sign, the developer was an enabler.”
Hilos applies the same logic to physical product design. Machine vision models, manufacturing-enabled CAD pipelines, and LLMs trained on footwear expertise allow a designer to go from concept to manufacturable output without passing through a chain of specialists. Sample production time drops from three months to one day.
The adoption challenge is not technical. Stahl observes a consistent pattern across the footwear industry: executives under pressure from boards to show AI ROI, while designers resist because they see AI as a black box that will replace them. The gap between the board’s mandate and the designer’s fear is where adoption stalls.
Hilos resolves that gap by centering the designer’s stated needs: “Designers want control. They want creativity and control without compromise.” The platform is designed to give designers more control over output, not less — removing the external vetoes from the specialist chain while giving the designer direct access to the manufacturing constraints those specialists previously held. The result, as Stahl frames it, is a lighthouse example of how AI can supercharge creativity rather than threaten it.
How a Scaling CEO Can Build Personal Growth Habits That Prevent Becoming the Company’s Bottleneck
A CEO who grows slower than their company becomes the ceiling. Stahl is explicit about this. The question is what practices actually produce CEO-level growth at the pace a scaling company requires.
Stahl names three. First, executive coaching. He connects it directly to the mental discipline he developed in IDF Special Forces — the practice of putting your own mental state on the operating table and examining it honestly. Coaching provides that external check for him as CEO. It also surfaces patterns from other CEOs navigating similar stages, which compresses the learning cycle.
Second, peer relationships with other CEOs. Stahl describes the value as immediate: “I love the magic when you get CEOs in a room because we all talk the same language and it’s just like very quick, immediate, intimate banter.” Peer cohorts provide a form of benchmarking that advisory boards and mentors cannot replicate — not because the advice is better, but because the shared context is identical.
Third — and the one Stahl describes as most recent and most impactful — is actively maintaining parts of his identity that have nothing to do with Hilos. He is a history nerd, an archaeology enthusiast, and an amateur distiller. These are not hobbies in the ordinary sense. They are the mechanism by which he maintains a stable identity that does not collapse into the company’s outcomes.
Stahl’s reasoning is operational, not philosophical: “Every founder has to disassociate themselves from their company at some point in order to be successful. They have to do that to take bigger risks with the company. And they have to do that in order to actually be a more effective leader.” When a CEO’s identity and the company’s identity are identical, every company-level risk becomes a personal existential threat. The CEO’s risk tolerance converges toward zero exactly when the company’s growth requires it to be highest.
The founder who disassociates correctly takes bigger bets on the business, because losing the bet is not the same as losing themselves.
What Scaling CEOs Take Away from Elias Stahl’s Leadership Framework
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| The CEO is the ceiling | A company cannot grow faster than its CEO grows. The hub-and-spokes model works at the founding stage and becomes a structural constraint after it. | Stahl built the “you grow faster than the company” expectation into every Hilos hire from the start. He credits this discipline with keeping the leadership team self-selecting toward people who treat their own growth as non-negotiable — producing a team Stahl trusts to lead domains independently rather than routing every decision back to him. |
| Transition from deciding to coaching | The move from hub-and-spokes to domain-based leadership requires the CEO to replace directives with questions and replace answers with frameworks that help leaders choose their own direction. | Stahl made this transition by building relationships with 26- and 30-year industry veterans before he needed to delegate — giving him trusted domain leaders who could own decisions when Hilos’s growth rate made the hub-and-spokes model unworkable. The transition produced a leadership team capable of operating independently across design, manufacturing, and go-to-market without routing through Stahl. |
| Vulnerability is a communication strategy, not a personality trait | CEOs who name their own weaknesses publicly before delivering critical feedback create the safety that allows problems to surface before they become crises. | Stahl opens one-on-ones by naming his own tendency toward demanding without praising — that disclosure changes how the feedback that follows is received, and at the company-wide level, walking teams through the reasoning behind a strategic reversal prevents the experience of being jerked around and sustains trust across subsequent changes. |
| AI adoption depends on centering the human’s stated need for control | When AI is framed as removing the adversarial relationship in a production chain rather than replacing the human, adoption accelerates and output quality increases. | Hilos reduced footwear sample production from three months to one day by giving designers direct access to manufacturing constraints rather than routing those constraints through specialist intermediaries. |
| Identity separation from the company enables bigger bets | Founders who maintain a stable personal identity outside their company take larger risks on the business because the company’s outcomes are no longer existential personal threats. | Stahl credits identity separation — maintained through history, archaeology, and amateur distilling — with enabling him to make the larger strategic bets Hilos requires at its current growth stage. A CEO whose identity collapses into the company’s outcomes sees every company-level risk as a personal existential threat; their risk tolerance converges toward zero at exactly the moment the company’s growth requires it to be highest. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I could get into the smallest technical detail with the highest level conversation. I love that. I loved being able to bat back and forth. I love channel flipping.” — Elias Stahl, CEO and co-founder, Hilos
- “It’s harder for me to give praise. It’s harder for me to talk about the good work people are doing. I’m much more demanding and talking about what I want to see.” — Elias Stahl, CEO and co-founder, Hilos
- “I love the magic when you get CEOs in a room because we all talk the same language and it’s just like very quick, immediate, intimate banter.” — Elias Stahl, CEO and co-founder, Hilos
- “Anytime you wanted to build a website 20 years ago, you would have a designer design a beautiful, amazing website and go to a web developer, and the web developer would say, I can do 40% of this. It will take twice as long. Let’s change this back and forth. Then no code web development applications came out and the designers were able to design beautiful websites themselves. And the developers didn’t go away. They focused on building better tools for designers to use. Instead of the developer being a stop sign, the developer was an enabler.” — Elias Stahl, CEO and co-founder, Hilos
- “Every founder has to disassociate themselves from their company at some point in order to be successful. They have to do that to take bigger risks with the company. And they have to do that in order to actually be a more effective leader.” — Elias Stahl, CEO and co-founder, Hilos
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a CEO know when to stop being the hub and build a real leadership team?
The signal is not headcount or funding stage — it is when the CEO’s capacity to route decisions is visibly slowing the company down. Elias Stahl, CEO of Hilos, holds that the transition must happen before the bottleneck becomes a crisis: the CEO shifts from making decisions to asking questions that lead their leaders toward decisions. That shift requires domain-based leaders who are trusted and coached, not managed. When a CEO can describe who owns each major domain and trust that person to make high-stakes calls without a check-in, the transition is underway.
How should a CEO handle a company-wide strategic reversal without losing team trust?
Stahl’s approach at Hilos is to walk the team through the full line of reasoning — the original decision logic, the new information, and why the new information changes the conclusion — rather than simply announcing the change. The transparency prevents the experience of being jerked around, because the team can follow the logic and trust that the same process will apply to the next change. Admitting the mistake publicly is not sufficient; the CEO must show the reasoning that produced the mistake and the reasoning that produced the correction.
How should a CEO position AI tools inside a company where skilled employees fear replacement?
Stahl’s framework at Hilos is to center the employee’s stated need for control rather than leading with productivity claims. Designers told Hilos they want creativity and control without compromise. The platform was built to give designers more control, not less, by removing the external vetoes from the specialist chain. The result is a sample production cycle that dropped from three months to one day — but the adoption case was made on control, not efficiency. When employees see AI as removing an adversarial relationship rather than replacing their role, resistance drops.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Themselves First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
