Most CEOs talk about scaling like it is a company problem. More headcount. More systems. Better execution.
Elias Stahl framed it differently, and I think he is right. “You are the cap on the company’s growth,” he told me. “My job is to make sure that none of us stop growing.”
That is not motivational talk. It is operational reality. If the company grows 4x and you grow 1.2x, you become the limiter. The org will adapt around your bottlenecks. Your team will wait for you. Decisions will slow. Risk taking will drop.
Elias runs Hilos, a company building a no CAD 3D platform for footwear design and manufacturing. His leadership philosophy is shaped by a background that is not common in tech founders. Three years in Israeli special forces, then product leadership, then a deep dive into the footwear world. The thread tying it together is simple. High performing teams do not happen by accident. They are built. Then they are rebuilt as the company evolves.
The Team That Can Do The Impossible
Elias shared a story from the very beginning of his military training. They marched a team of 20 into the middle of nowhere. A truck held everything needed to live outdoors for a week. The instruction was simple. In 60 seconds, everything had to be out of the truck and “arranged neatly in stacks on a tarp, completely organized.”
It was chaos. People got hit with tents and beds. They failed. Then they had to put everything back in 60 seconds. They repeated the drill for an hour and a half until they could do it.
The lesson was not about packing. It was about coordination at full intensity. Elias said it plainly. “A small team of incredible type A people can accomplish the impossible if they’re all coordinated and doing 110%.”
That is the kind of team he wants to build at Hilos. Not a pile of impressive resumes. A unit that believes the peak is reachable and knows how to move together.
He made an important point CEOs often miss. You cannot just hire a big title and assume you now have a high performing team. “You can’t drop someone in that was a VP at Nike and say, okay, great. Now I’ve got the best experience in the world. I’m going to be able to achieve the impossible.”
This is built through shared work, shared standards, and shared trust.
The Hub And Spokes Trap
Every early company has a hub and spokes model. The founder is the center. Every decision runs through them. Everyone learns the founder’s taste. It is effective in the beginning.
It also stops scaling.
Elias was candid about how much he enjoyed that phase. “I knew everything that was happening in the company at all times,” he said. “I could get into the smallest technical detail with the highest level conversation.” He called it channel flipping and said it excited him.
Then he said the quiet part out loud. “You can’t scale that.”
The shift is not just operational. It is emotional. Elias compared it to sending a kid off to college. The relationship changes. You go from managing to leading. From directing to coaching. From providing answers to asking questions that help someone else choose the direction.
That transition is not clean. It is continuous. Elias said he is still getting used to it.
That is what real CEO scaling looks like. You give up control in order to build capacity.
Growth Through Vulnerability
Elias described two mantras at Hilos. The first is “growth through vulnerability.”
He gave an example that will resonate with a lot of founders. He can come off aggressive. He is blunt and high energy. He also knows that what the CEO says lands heavier than he intends, especially in cultures where bluntness can feel like a shock.
So he counters it with openness. He tells people what he is working on. He names his weaknesses. “It’s harder for me to give praise,” he said. “I’m much more demanding and talking about what I want to see.”
That matters because it changes how feedback is received. It also gives everyone permission to be honest about what they are struggling with.
He also uses vulnerability publicly. He described standing in front of the company and saying, “I thought that this was the highest priority. I now received this information. It’s different. I think I was wrong and we need to change.”
The key point is not the apology. It is the explanation. He wants people to follow the line of thinking so they are not jerked around by decisions that feel random.
Vulnerability Builds Speed
Vulnerability does not make you softer. It makes the company faster.
- People surface problems sooner
- Teams adjust without fear
- Leaders stop hiding mistakes
- The org learns instead of defending
Trust becomes a multiplier when things get hard, and things will get hard.
Never Done Growing
The second mantra is the one I want you to sit with. “You’re never done growing,” Elias said.
He tied it back to special forces. If the company grows 4x, you grow 4x. He tells people joining Hilos that the company will grow, and “your job is to grow faster than the company.”
Then he added the part many CEOs skip. “You decide when that stops.”
That is honest. Some people will not want to grow that fast. That is fine. The mistake is pretending the pace is optional.
If you want the company to scale, growth has to be part of the job description.
Scaling Yourself Without Losing Yourself
Elias shared how he works on his own growth.
Coaching helps. He described special forces training as deeply mental and said coaching gives him a way to “lay your mind on the operating table and say, here’s exactly what’s going on.”
He also relies on CEO peers. He said there is “magic when you get CEOs in a room” because the language is immediate and intimate. That peer pattern recognition is valuable.
Then he mentioned something that I think is critical and under discussed. A founder has to separate themselves from the company to take bigger risks and lead more effectively. “Every founder has to disassociate themselves from their company at some point in order to be successful,” he said.
He is a history nerd. An archaeology nerd. An amateur distiller. Those things make him more human. They also make him a better CEO because leadership is relational and cultural, not just targets and metrics.
A fully developed person leads better. Especially in an industry where taste, craft, and relationships matter.
AI That Makes Designers More Powerful
Hilos sits at the intersection of craft and advanced tech. Elias explained the current product creation chain in footwear. Designers hand off to 3D modeling, then development, then engineering. Specialists act as gatekeepers who tell designers what they can and cannot do.
Hilos is collapsing that chain. They are building workflows that let a designer go from concept directly to manufacturing. “We’re removing the expertise of all those other specialists,” Elias said. “We’re bringing it into the designer’s workflow.”
He used a metaphor that makes it click. No code for websites.
Twenty years ago, designers created mockups and developers pushed back. No code tools changed the relationship. Developers stopped being a stop sign and became enablers. Designers could move faster. Websites got better.
Hilos is trying to do the same thing for physical products, starting with footwear.
This is where the AI conversation gets real. Executives feel pressure to show ROI quickly. Designers feel threatened. Elias sees that tension everywhere in footwear. He described designers viewing AI as a black box that will replace them.
His stance is practical. Designers want control. “They want creativity and control without compromise,” he said. Give them that and AI stops being adversarial.
The ROI becomes tangible.
- A sample in a day, not three months
- Designers iterate faster
- Developers shift from gatekeeping to learning new constraints and materials
Elias described this as a lighthouse story for how AI can supercharge creativity instead of flattening it. He said their platform relies on machine vision, manufacturing models, and LLMs that help gather footwear expertise and guide designers.
That is the future I want more CEOs to build. Tools that make people better, not smaller.
What This Means For You
If your company is growing fast, the first risk is not competition. It is you.
The founder hub and spokes model feels productive until it becomes the choke point. The fix is not stepping back completely. The fix is building a leadership team that can own domains, then shifting your role from decision maker to coach.
Elias gave a clear standard for the pace required. Grow faster than the company. Keep growing. Never stop. Listen to the full episode of The Scaling CEO here.
I am Glenn Gow. I coach CEOs. If you are building a leadership team, trying to break out of the hub and spokes trap, and want to scale without losing the human side of the work, let’s talk.
