Punk, Metal, Orchestra, Jazz

Most scale-ups end up as orchestras. The good ones learn to improvise.

Music has always been part of my life. Unsurprisingly, the Long Strange Trip’s episode with Bayer’s Bill Anderson resonated with me.

If you have one hour to spare, give it a listen. Bill Anderson is the CEO of Bayer, the 160+ years German pharmaceuticals giant. During his tenure, he re-engineered the organisation, flattening the management layers and optimising for flexibility and speed. Two things that make organisations thrive in our day and age.

Inevitably, this made me think about my own organisation.

I was lucky enough to live through the transformation of a scrappy startup into a scale-up operating in seven European markets (and counting). When I joined Holidu, we were little more than 60 people. At the first summer party I attended, in 2017, plus-ones were invited to make it feel more like a party. Today, there are about 300 people in my department alone.

In building this behemoth, we went through the typical archetypes of a startup growing fast. In the podcast, Bill Anderson talks about orchestras and jazz bands when it comes to scaling organisations.

Building on this metaphor, and thinking back to my experience, startups are punk rock. Listen to the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” or the first couple of Blink-182 albums. I think you’ll get what I mean. Nobody knows how to play an instrument, it is pure raw energy, and attitude wins over technique. It’s Joey Ramone spitting 1-2-3 before “Blitzkrieg Bop” attacks on the Ramones’ first album.

A startup is exactly the same. It’s a bunch of youngsters figuring things out as they go. It’s a lot of faking it till you make it. There are plenty of anecdotes collected over the years of customers won over by charm and passion rather than by actual features. In technical terms, it’s also called sales-led growth. In real life, this is punk rock.

Eventually, successful punk rock bands graduate from the dive bars and college parties and get to play on bigger stages. Same thing goes for startups.

When you get some traction, either as a band or as a startup, you get noticed, you get a bit more money, and a different kind of producer comes onboard to help make your second album more appealing to the masses.

It is time to scale. The equivalent of a more polished, professional producer in the startup world is the experienced folks from the outside. You start hiring senior individual contributors to counterbalance the punk rock energy of people fresh out of uni, and professional managers enter the picture.

Just like a more professional producer, the professional manager has done it before and knows how to get to the next level.

During this phase, the goal is to build a machine that can quickly hire, onboard, and get many new recruits up to speed. A new CRM is implemented, or the existing one finally gets revamped. Knowledge needs to be documented, hierarchy starts to build, and so do processes.

Any self-respecting professional manager knows that chaos doesn’t scale, and their job is to put structure around the raw punk rock energy.

The punk rock band becomes heavy metal.

Scale-ups also go through a heavy metal phase: hyper-growth. Things move as fast as a Kirk Hammett solo. New markets, new people, new products. Especially in the ZIRP era, money was cheap, AI was not in the cards, and the best way to scale was hiring people.

Organisations became orchestras without realising it. After all, isn’t it what many heavy metal bands do after a couple of albums? They get orchestras involved until they become one.

What are the characteristics of an orchestra, you might ask.

Orchestras have a strong hierarchy. They also follow a music sheet, and while there is some room for interpretation, to the untrained ear, Mozart’s 40th symphony will always sound like Mozart’s 40th symphony, no matter who the interpreter is. In organisational terms, you build many layers of people who follow a well-documented process without questioning whether it makes sense at all.

The world in 2026 doesn’t want you to play orchestra music. It wants you to play jazz.

Contrary to popular belief, jazz is a genre with plenty of rules and a severe structure. In fact, it’s the most demanding structure of the four genres I mentioned. It requires musicians who are deeply skilled in their own craft and who can own the piece. They track key changes, tempo changes, and each other, without a conductor.

To many, jazz might sound like freedom. It is actually mastery.

There are three things that distinguish jazz from an orchestra.

The framework is not documented but internalised. Have you ever seen a jazz band following a music sheet? No. They get on stage, they look at each other, and they start jamming. In org terms, while the orchestra follows centralised processes and team members have little room for interpretation, jazz relies on ownership and leaves a lot of freedom to the individual to do what is right in that given moment.

There is no conductor, but a leader. Orchestras are top-down organisations. You have the conductor, the first violin, the second violin, and so on. Jazz has a bandleader who sets the tune, the key, and the initial tempo, but then lets people play. This is the type of leadership required today. Large top-down organisations become inevitably too slow to adapt to market needs. It is a natural consequence of growth. The central teams that were once close to the customer eventually drift away from them. Yet they still take the critical decisions.

Listening replaces instructions. In an orchestra, everyone is focused on their own sheet. If you follow your sheet and keep the tempo, you can’t go wrong. Unless you are a business. Then things can go sideways. These are the typical silos that plague organisations. Eventually, people stop talking to each other. They follow their own scripts, loosely coordinated from above. In jazz, the whole thing runs because the musicians are listening to and looking at each other.

I have to admit, my organisation at moments feels more like an orchestra. But there are some things that will eventually get us closer to a jazz band.

The principle I keep coming back to is centralised framework, decentralised ownership. An organisation of 300 people needs a common framework, but, like jazz players, individuals and managers should be able to adapt it to what the local customer wants, and have the freedom to do so. In my world, each market is very different. Different seasonality, different supply mix, different ADR. A villa in Mallorca is a different beast from the same villa in Crete, two islands that share the same sea and almost nothing else. Local teams need to be able to take the decisions that win their market. At the same time, the metrics are centralised, because we all need to move in the same direction.

Talent density — an idea from Netflix’s Reed Hastings and his book No Rules Rules — is non-negotiable for an organisation that wants to play jazz. An orchestra can afford a weak second violin because the structure of the music sheet covers for them. A jazz quartet doesn’t have that luxury. With fewer players and no sheet to refer to, every person needs to pull their own weight, read the room, and adapt when needed. That raises the bar for who belongs on the stage. In an organisation, it usually means fewer, more talented people with more scope — the same flattening I started this piece with. The harder truth is that you rarely build this density by hiring. Don’t get me wrong, hiring is important. You want output-driven people who think and act like owners. But in my experience, you can do a great job during the hiring process and yet bring the wrong people on board. This is especially painful at the manager level, where it can take time to spot the low performers. More often than not, you build density by asking an orchestra to learn to improvise, and accepting that not everyone will want to. At that point, you need to have a frank conversation about their future in the organisation.

The third shift is the hardest, because you don’t fully control it. It means breaking the most natural way large organisations work: in silos. An orchestra rehearses by section and only assembles for the performance. A jazz band only exists when everyone is in the room, reacting to each other.

That is the harder thing to build. Shared metrics are the starting point: at least everyone is reading from the same page and committing to the same objectives. But that alone won’t make the magic happen. What actually plagues siloed organisations is meetings — endless alignment between teams that should already be working together, ending with everyone frustrated because no decision was made and no problem was solved.

The way I see it, a meeting should serve one of three functions: share information with context (for example, a change that affects how people work), surface a problem blocking the company, or make the decision that solves it. To play jazz, every meeting needs an objective tied to one of those three. Small, focused, with a clear agenda and shared metrics — not large, generic gatherings held just to communicate.

Meetings, though, are just the most visible part of governance, the third big idea in moving an organisation from playing like an orchestra to playing jazz. Governance is something not many organisations do properly, because it is invisible and intangible. Nobody has it in their job description. And it is a word rarely associated with the punk energy of a startup or the speed metal of a scale-up going through its hyper-growth phase.

Looking at my organisation today, we are far from being a seasoned jazz band. But I see it as a wonderful journey, and I am genuinely excited to be part of it.

This is, in any case, the direction every organisation is being pushed in 2026, consciously or not. A world that changes this fast doesn’t reward the company that follows its sheet — or its script — most faithfully. It rewards the one whose people can read the change and adapt to it, together, without waiting to be told.

Which is the real test, and the hardest thing to read through a deck or a spreadsheet. You can probably only catch it if you’ve lived through it