We recently hosted two breakfast sessions with product-led growth (PLG) founders and executives to discuss all things talent in PLG businesses. We hosted the breakfast in collaboration with the team at True Search, who have worked with some of the fastest PLG businesses in Europe including WeTransfer, Craft.do and Pleo.

Filling leadership roles in PLG organisations has become one of the main challenges for PLG companies. While the number of PLG businesses has grown significantly in the last 5 years, the pool of experienced candidates willing to move to new and upcoming businesses is rather limited. According to an analysis run by True Search, based on a sample of over 200 companies, only 3% of the people in leadership roles are open to having a conversation about new opportunities. And, not only that, once you find and recruit an executive for your PLG business, the average tenure is under 2 years, which means that you will be looking to hire a new executive in less than 24 months.

As we would expect, small, unknown companies struggle the most to attract experienced PLG executives. 78% of the C-level executives of well-established and fast-growing PLG companies - such as Asana, Atlassian, Box, DataDog and Notion - come from within the industry i.e. from other PLG businesses. These C-level executives tend to have an average of 20+ years of experience and 68% of them are brought in from external businesses (against 20% of them who are internally promoted).

These stats make it clear that it’s mainly small and unknown businesses  that will struggle the most to attract experienced executive teams to their businesses. The challenge is even more significant for European businesses, where the number of successful PLG companies is smaller than in the US and, therefore, the pool of experienced candidates is also smaller. Some PLG businesses have opted to hire executives from consumer backgrounds (specifically from B2C subscription business models) to fulfil leadership roles in PLG businesses. Ultimately, businesses need to hire C and VP-level executives to continue growing and delaying these hires can have a significant impact on their growth trajectory.

Our Talent Director, Michelle Cheng, looked at PLG companies that have recently raised A or B rounds - she found that they had slightly smaller teams and hired both C-level sales and marketing executives later than traditional sales-led businesses. Ultimately, it is probably true that it takes longer to build significant revenue and traction for PLG businesses (as the product needs to be ready for self-serve and the ACVs are usually very small), so that might be one of the reasons why PLG businesses delay the time in which they bring C and VP level executives on board.

I want to thank all the founders and executives who joined us for the PLG sessions in Madrid and Paris. Thank you so much for your questions and for contributing to the discussion. Thank you also to Louisa and Maitane from the True Search team for co-hosting the events with us and for bringing your experience to the discussion. And last, but not least, big thanks to Michelle and Ines for making the event happen.