This is a crossroads many entrepreneurs will recognize. Entrepreneurs always have to solve side problems along the way to realizing their original vi… - Reid Hoffman

The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.

Slack had spent nearly five years and $ 17 million on development prior to its public launch in February 2014. Just two months later, before the end of April, it had raised another $ 43 million. Both of these investments took place before Slack had proven its revenue model and started generating significant sales. Slack’s freemium business model (offering a free service and encouraging users to upgrade later to becoming paying customers) meant that even after two months of rapid user growth, the company hadn’t proven its ability to make money. Fortunately for Slack and its investors, this aggressiveness paid off. As the initial wave of free users started converting to paid, Slack was able to raise an additional $ 120 million six months later to accelerate its growth even further.

In some ways, entrepreneurs are built to thrive in challenging times and conditions, says BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. “I’ve noticed that times of crisis favor founder-led companies, because they’re headed by people who like improvising. They think about things through first principles and are okay adapting and changing their business.” “During times like this,” he adds, “you have to be totally open to changing everything that you’ve been doing and pursuing opportunities you didn’t know existed.” That plays to the strengths of founders. As does the fact that entrepreneurs are just used to struggling — they often relish the struggle.