ARTIFACT: The Leadership Agenda that VSCO Used to Navigate a Post-Scaling Crisis

This season of Spotlight On, we’re inviting guests to share artifacts—decks, emails, agendas, dashboards—from an inflection point in building their business. Together, they offer a wealth of wisdom on how great companies navigate pivotal moments.  

Here’s a moment familiar to most founders who’ve navigated the transition from startup to scaleup: you raise a significant round of funding. You double the team’s headcount. And just when you think things will get much easier—it’s the opposite. It feels like you’ve lost the easy way of working together you had in your early years.

 Joel Flory, co-founder and chairman of VSCO—the popular photo editing and community app—found himself at this moment in 2015. He sensed that the root of the problem was that his leadership team had wildly divergent ideas about what success for the company looked like and that they needed to align. Joel and his Chief People Officer, Katy Shields, developed the following leadership offsite agenda loosely inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The offsite was a success, and the discussion mapped here reset the foundational direction and culture of the company for years to come. 

In his Spotlight On episode, Joel discusses his journey building VSCO and the lessons he’s learned on leadership and scaling.