Better late than never, also for last year we are sharing what we learned in our job as founders at Sweav. 

When we look back at 2025, the theme is clear: Separation. For years, we were the engine. If we stopped pedalling, the bike stopped moving. But this year, we realized that for Sweav to truly scale, we as founders had to become “optional” for the day-to-day. 

It was a messy, ego-bruising, but ultimately liberating transition. Here are our five core learnings from the past year.

1. Let it go, let it go

In the early days, you are the company. Then, you become one with the company. But 2025 marked our entry into the third phase: The company and the founders are separate entities. The company now runs on its own. It still needs us, but the role has shifted from “doing” to “designing”.

• The easy part: Delegating the stuff you hate. We already hired an EA in our first year, and it was the best decision we ever made.
• The hard part: Delegating the stuff you actually think you’re good at and take pride in. For example, only this year did we finally hire someone to manage business development, matching and marketing.

It can make you feel useless, but that’s actually the goal. You need to become bored. It’s from the “brainwaves of boredom” that true creativity and the next big business ideas come. If you’re stuck in high-adrenaline, dopamine-driven execution, you’ll never see what’s next.

2. Stop trusting yourself, start trusting your process

Hiring a “mini-me” – someone who does exactly what you do – is easy. You trust your gut because you know the role inside out. But when you start hiring for functions outside your expertise, your intuition will fail you.

Your “gut feeling” is just a collection of implicit experiences. If you’ve never run a high-level finance or specialized tech department, your gut has no data. We learned the hard way: we made a few hiring fuck-ups by over-relying on “vibe.”

Now, we use a rigid, almost “too much” hiring process. It felt stiff at first, but sticking to it has delivered 100% strong hires. In this phase, you can’t afford hiring mistakes. Build the process, then trust it more than yourself.

3. Rip off the band-aid

Scaling is like a reptile shedding its skin. Things that were essential last year – certain tech, specific partners, even our beloved office – suddenly become constraints.

When something stops working, fix it or replace it immediately. We’ve found that the short-term pain of “ripping off the bandaid” is always better than the long-term drag of mediocrity. In this phase, there’s no room for second chances.

• People: If they aren’t the right fit for the upcoming stage, you have to move on.
• Tech & Partners: If they don’t support the new processes and volume, they need to go.
• Space: As we outgrew our office we didn’t wait, we moved.

It sounds harsh, but it clears the negativity. Once the hard change is made, the energy in the room shifts back to growth.

4. In the labour market: plan ahead and use hacks

You can be agile in your product, but you cannot be agile in a scarce labour market. Hiring the right person takes 6+ months. In a scale-up, that is a cosmic timescale. We waited too long for some key roles this year and we nearly drowned.

However, we found two “hacks” that work:

1. The Freelance-to-Permanent Bridge: Hire a freelancer to start tomorrow. It skips the “regular recruitment” lag and lets you test the fit in real-time. And no, we are not just selling Sweav here – it really works for us internally as well.
2. The Student Pipeline: We work with working students, and this year two of them turned out to be absolute super-talents. We would have never found them through a standard “medior” job post.

5. Start analyzing (again)

When we started Sweav, we threw our consulting toolkits out the window. Over-analyzing is the enemy of a Day 1 startup. But as a scale-up, “just doing” is no longer enough. 

We’ve moved back to our roots. Now that we have the volume and data, we are using our consulting skills again to help our team analyze the data and prioritize our focus.