From Google CMO to startup founder: How leadership changes when you’re the one building it

At 28, I became Google’s youngest country CMO, overseeing multimillion-dollar budgets and leading teams. I had fought for that role for two years, and when I finally got it, I expected to feel elated, but instead I felt bewildered.

Yes, my career prospects were immense, but something was missing. Maybe it was the realisation that I was executing someone else’s vision. Or maybe it was just the pressure I had built up in my own head after chasing the role so hard for so long.

Nine years later, I made a decision that, frankly, many of my colleagues thought was reckless: I left Google to start my own company. That shift taught me more about leadership than any handbook or training session ever could. Moving from managing at scale to building from scratch forces you to completely rewire how you think about leading people.

There is a moment every startup founder hits when they realise they simply cannot do it all themselves anymore. One day, you are onboarding customers and debugging code at 3 a.m. Next, you are staring at an org chart, trying to make sense of how your team of five became fifty people you barely have time to speak with individually.

This is not just about hiring more people or implementing new processes. It is about fundamentally changing what leadership means to you.

Corporate leadership runs on structure

At Google, everything had to be capable of handling millions of customers. I could not do anything that was not scalable from day one. The culture was already there – I just needed to adopt, adjust, and implement it. There were frameworks for everything: 10 principles of innovation, established communication channels, and teams of hundreds constantly thinking about organisational effectiveness.

Corporate leadership is largely about working within established systems. You inherit a culture rather than create one. The infrastructure allows you to think big and execute, but within defined parameters. Sometimes you can be extremely successful even if your projects were not, simply because you were very good at internal marketing. I think that is both a strength and a weakness of large organisations.

The risk tolerance becomes increasingly conservative over time. By the time I left Google, it had become so risk-averse that I felt I couldn’t even try to create another billion-dollar business. Everything moved slowly. This felt incredibly frustrating when you are used to the pace of innovation.

Startup leadership demands resilience and reinvention

When I started my own company, everything changed overnight. My day-to-day became completely different. Even though I had worked long hours in the corporate world, I could sleep well at night. As an entrepreneur, I am always excited and energised, but also always problem-solving. It’s a different kind of intensity, more raw, more personal.

In a startup, you think about both strategy and execution every day. You are a jack of all trades because there is no one else to delegate to. Resources are tighter, so decisions get made quickly, often with incomplete data, and without supporting functions or the brand aura that big companies rely on.

You need 10x the resilience in a startup – not because the work is harder, but because your decisions shape the business in real time. That level of ownership is both empowering and relentless.

In a corporate setting, you have infrastructure that allows you to believe in yourself, think big, and execute, but in a startup, you have to do everything end-to-end while constantly adapting to setbacks. The most striking difference is how you create culture from scratch rather than adapting to an existing one. When your team fits around one table, culture happens through your direct actions and values, not through formal processes or company-wide communications.

In a startup, every two months, the whole structure of the company is different because there are so many more people joining and different team structures forming. This means you have to constantly adapt your communication style and management approach. You grow in ways you never expected – not just as a leader, but as a communicator, a recruiter, and a culture-setter.

What changes as you scale

The transition from startup to scale-up leadership is, I think, one of the hardest shifts in business. You have to learn how to get results through other people, while somehow holding on to the quality and pace that got you this far, and it’s by no means easy.

You start realising that systems and processes are no longer a bureaucracy and corporate noise, but rather something that keeps you steady. They help you maintain clarity and alignment as your team expands. What used to run smoothly with casual check-ins now requires structure.

Perhaps the biggest and hardest shift is that you are no longer the one making every decision. Instead, you become a visionary and a culture carrier. You influence the end result through others now, and your job is to inspire how they behave, how they lead, and how they make decisions when you’re not in the room. This requires a completely different skill set, which I’m frankly, I am still learning.

The delegation challenge is real. Letting go of control can feel risky, but it’s also what allows your team to grow into their own leadership. I used to know every customer interaction, every product decision, every hire. Now I find out about important developments in Slack channels or weekly updates.

It can feel like you’re less in the loop, but the influence you have through others who share your vision is often even more powerful.

The principles that grow with you

While methods must evolve dramatically, certain leadership principles build resilience throughout your journey.

You always need urgency, whether you have five people or fifty. But when you are small, urgency comes from you running around putting out fires. When you scale up, urgency has to come from everyone else believing it matters too. Authenticity becomes more important, not less. I have never tried to cover up anything or pretend to be someone I am not. This stayed true in both my corporate and startup roles, and I believe it is a big part of whatever success I have achieved.

Most critically, you must continue to truly live in the market yourself. Whether you are managing five people or five hundred, you cannot delegate your connection to customers. The moment you rely entirely on reports rather than spending direct time understanding customer friction and needs, you start losing touch with the reality that drives your business.

This is something I learned at Google, and it has served me well in the startup world.

The emotional side of growing as a founder

The psychological change is as dramatic as the operational one. In a startup, the link between your decisions and outcomes is immediate and clear.

In the corporate world, you sometimes wonder what your impact would be if you went on vacation for three months. The machine keeps running without you. In a startup, there is no question about your direct impact. Sometimes that is thrilling; sometimes it is terrifying.

I could never have continued to be a happy corporate executive if I had not pursued my dream of being an entrepreneur. There was no other option for me, really. But I also had to accept that this is not just a career move. It is like choosing a life partner for the next 10 years, with everything that includes. The good and the bad.

My advice to others building this resilience

For anyone considering leaving corporate life to start something, be ready for an uncomfortably exciting journey that requires a 10-year commitment mindset. The skills that feel foreign now, such as systematic thinking, formal processes, and working through others, are the tools that will unlock your next level of impact. But you have to be willing to embrace the discomfort of constant learning.

Start implementing formal communication rhythms before you think you need them. Regular all-hands meetings, transparent goal tracking, and systematic check-ins are not corporate bureaucracy when done right. They are the nervous system of a scaling organisation.

Most importantly, remember that growing a company means growing as a leader. The challenge is not just scaling your business. It is scaling your mindset, systems, and impact while staying true to the vision that made you start in the first place. Cut yourself some slack. You are going to mess up parts of this transition, and that is normal.

The urgency and authenticity that got you here will serve you well, but only if you are willing to express them through entirely new methods. Leadership evolution is not about changing who you are. It is about expanding how you lead while never losing sight of why you began.

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