How I Scaled MLG Blockchain to 120 Employees in 9 Months — With Zero Funding

In early 2016, MLG Blockchain had four people on a call trying to figure out if blockchain consulting was even a real business. By the end of that year, we had 120 employees across a dozen time zones, an 8-figure revenue run rate, and zero dollars of external funding.

Nobody handed us a playbook. We wrote it as we went.

Here is what I learned.

Hire for mindset, train for skill

The biggest mistake founders make when scaling fast is hiring for credentials. We hired for intellectual curiosity, a bias for action, and the ability to work without hand-holding.

Remote work filters this naturally. If someone needs daily check-ins to stay on track, the remote environment will expose it immediately. We had no room for that. Every person we brought on had to be trusted to own their lane completely.

Build the systems before you need them

We hit 40 people before we had a real onboarding process. That was too late.

By the time we fixed it, we had lost two good hires who never quite understood their role and three months of compounding confusion across the team. The lesson: build for the team you will have in 90 days, not the one you have today.

Document everything. Not because you are building a bureaucracy, but because documentation is how you clone your best people's knowledge. An employee wiki, clear project briefs, defined communication norms — these are not nice-to-haves. They are the infrastructure of a distributed company.

Async by default, synchronous by intention

We made every meeting earn its place. If it could be a Slack message, it was a Slack message. If it could be a Loom, it was a Loom. Meetings happened when real-time decision-making or alignment was necessary — not out of habit.

This gave people deep work blocks and reduced the coordination tax that kills productivity in remote teams.

Culture is explicit, not emergent

In an office, culture happens by osmosis. In a remote team, if you do not design it deliberately, you get nothing.

We made our values explicit from day one: bias for action, radical ownership, straight talk. We referenced them in hiring decisions, in performance conversations, in how we handled disagreement. Culture was not a wall poster — it was the operating system.

The result

Nine months. Four to one hundred and twenty. Eight-figure revenue. No investors telling us what to do.

The constraints forced creativity. The remote model forced discipline. And the discipline, compounded over nine months, built something we were all proud of.

The playbook exists. It just takes the courage to trust it.