Questions to ask hypergrowth startups

A startup grows because it's getting closer to product market fit. At the earlier stages, having a good product market fit is heavily tied to the quality of the product & its ability to effectively fill a problem space. So I'd anchor your questions on getting conviction on if the product is good. Questions like:

• What does the roadmap look like in the next year or two look like?
• Is there a process (or a sense of urgency) for responding to customer feedback?

Would be a good starting point around thinking what questions to ask.

The primary reason why I really want to join this startup is to catch that hypergrowth wave, similar to what Seed did during his time at Klaviyo. However, something that worries me is that by the time I join this startup (in Jun, Jul or Aug 2025), the hypergrowth period will have ended, which kinda defeats the purpose of why I'd want to join in the first place.

Do you have evidence that growth will slow down next year? One useful exercise is to try to come up reasons for why the startup could continue its growth as well as reasons for why the startup might slow down its growth. Then, for each of the reasons, come up with probabilities for each reason. A lot of the reasons that you come up with could be made up, but it can help to guide the questions that you ask.

1. What verticals are they thinking of expanding to, and why did they decide to target these verticals? (you could look at comparable startups that also target these verticals to estimate how big the market is, and use it to estimate the potential valuation)
2. Where is their revenue coming from? How do they charge their customers? A good sign is if their current customers pay more based on usage or based on head count because it means the startup will scale as their customers scale.

There's probably a reason why you want to join a hypergrowth company: learning quickly in a fast moving environment, being able to quickly advance your career as fast as the company grows, or capturing the growth of your equity value. I would try to figure out what is the most appealing from the above reasons to ask questions about whether that opportunity will still exist when you join a year from now.

One caveat to remember is that doubling headcount is not always a good thing. Until a company reaches PMF you want a super lean company. Often times startups will rapidly add headcount and then also start trimming once they realize the product isnt gaining traction. Often times startups run as lean as they can until series B atleast

James Hawkins, founder of Posthog (which is undergoing hypergrowth right now), shared his perspective here: The Really Important Job Interview Questions Engineers Should Ask (But Don't)