Are you building a company that can thrive for the next fifteen years, or are you accidentally building a bottleneck that will eventually force a fire sale? This is the question facing every founder who looks past the early wins and toward the longer arc of what they’ve created.
In a recent episode of Growth Sessions by iubenda, CEO Manuel Heilmann and founder Andrea Giannangelo sit down to discuss the things most startup conversations skip: the emotional complexity of letting go, the structural moves that make scale possible, or the decisions that determine whether a company survives its own success.
Make the strategic move before you need to
The decision to join team.blue in 2022 was not made under pressure. When it joined the digital solutions group, iubenda was profitable, growing, and ranked among the top three in its market despite being bootstrapped in a space where competitors had raised tens of millions.
Andrea made the move because the timing was right, not because it was necessary.
The window for a strategic move (whether that’s raising funding, joining a group, or bringing in a successor) is open for a limited period. Founders who wait for certainty tend to wait too long, and by the time a move feels truly necessary, they’re negotiating from weakness. Those who miss that window often end up in a fire sale and pay the price.
On the operational side, team.blue took on activities like IT infrastructure that had a smaller impact on growth, so iubenda could focus on what mattered more and move faster than independent competitors.
The decoupling process: when founders must let go
The handover from founder to successor is rarely the clean event it looks like on a slide. Andrea describes it as a “decoupling process,” similar to a family member leaving home. He emphasizes the importance of knowing when to step back and appreciating that this change is for the best.
“If you’re constantly questioning and sabotaging… the company is going to continue to depend on you… and it just doesn’t go in a way that you should want.” Andrea Giannangelo, iubenda’s founder
During this transition, the founder can add real value, such as:
- Historical context. The reasoning behind past decisions that might otherwise look arbitrary to anyone stepping in fresh.
- Vision under uncertainty. “The art is making a decision where you don’t have all of the data,” Andrea says. “That’s the art of making business. It’s in that span of uncertainty.” This is a capability that comes from years of lived experience, and it’s difficult to replicate from metrics alone.
From intuition to structure
A founder begins with almost no data and relies on instinct built up over the years. This can make the handover genuinely difficult, because instinct doesn’t transfer.
Manuel’s response was to build structures that allow data to replace what intuition once provided. The two most significant changes:
- Business units with clear ownership. Rather than decisions flowing through one central point, each unit had defined leadership and decision rights, making gaps and strengths visible across the organization.
- Product and engineering under one roof. Bringing these teams together improved execution speed and alignment not just between them, but with the broader go-to-market function.
Manuel is candid that this is still a work in progress. “You come in, and you expect people to make decisions,” he says. “Please make decisions. And then you look around and nobody’s making decisions and you say, what’s wrong?” Decision-making processes and getting people to step into that authority were among the first things he tackled when it came to scaling iubenda.
Preserving the soul of a remote-first company
Andrea describes iubenda’s culture across a fully remote team of 150 people not as a set of policies but as something closer to a living organism.
What makes iubenda unusual is that colleagues who have never met in person tend to feel genuine friendship and chemistry when they finally do. This didn’t happen by design, but it wasn’t accidental either. It emerged from thousands of small decisions, most of them about people.
The culture at iubenda became self-replicating, and it’s one of the most durable things a founder can build.
“A new CEO should not come in and just change the culture… it’s about preserving all the good aspects and developing it to the next level.” Manuel Heilmann, CEO of iubenda
Three things every founder should hear
Before the conversation ends, both Andrea and Manuel keep returning to the same practical themes:
- Invest in HR early. Andrea hired a head of HR earlier than almost any founder he knows. Most treat it as a discretionary cost. He treated it as one of the highest-return investments available, because better hiring and stronger culture compound in ways that are invisible at first and irreversible later.
- Protect your thinking time. The deeper you get into operational detail, the harder it becomes to see clearly. “Fight back on being too busy,” Andrea says simply. Strategic judgment requires space.
- Cut process before it cuts you. “If you feel that things are just becoming a process for the sake of having a process, get rid of it,” Manuel says. One of his most deliberate moves was slashing the number of meetings after recognizing they had become a symptom of bureaucracy, not a driver of alignment.
In short
Every major decision made, including joining team.blue and bringing in a successor, came down to one priority: building something that lasts.
Mutual respect is what made the iubenda transition work. Manuel (CEO) could rely on Andrea (founder)’s fifteen years of experience building iubenda. Andrea left space for Manuel to quickly bring a fresh perspective to the organization.
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