The Founders' List: Shishir Mehrotra with an Inside Look at How YouTube Scaled (Rituals for Hypergrowth)

The NFX Podcast

In this episode, Shishir Mehrotra shares insights from his time at YouTube, discussing team structure, cross-functional coordination challenges and best practices. He delves into the specifics of meeting cadences, effective communication methods, and the art of canceling unnecessary meetings.

This is The Founders' List - audio versions of essays from technology’s most important leaders, selected by the founder community.

When Shishir Mehrotra left YouTube in 2014, a number of other company leaders wanted to understand how YouTube worked from the inside. He wrote this article summarizing their key rituals in a stage of hypergrowth. This article was originally published in 2015, but has since been expanded upon by Shishir.

Read the full essay here - https://coda.io/@shishir/rituals-for-hypergrowth-an-inside-look-at-how-youtube-scaled

(0:00) Introduction (1:02) Inside YouTube: Team structure and integration into Google (3:01) Overcoming cross-functional coordination challenges (4:32) Culture, rituals, and best practices at YouTube (6:52) Cadences and meetings: The YouTube way (10:20) Effective communication: From meeting readouts to email broadcasts (11:10) The art of canceling unnecessary meetings (11:24) Conclusion and outro