When a company grows from a founding team to four hundred employees, the hiring philosophy cannot stay the same at every stage. The traits that make someone an excellent early-stage hire—strong execution under direction, comfort with ambiguity, broad willingness to pitch in—are different from the traits required of a leader who will own an entire domain and make decisions that shape the company’s trajectory. David Natroshvili discusses this distinction directly in a Forbes Australia profile that traces how his hiring criteria shifted as SPRIBE scaled, and what the company has learned from getting that transition both right and wrong.
Two Stages, Two Different Talent Profiles
Natroshvili frames the distinction between early and later hiring with clarity. Early SPRIBE employees needed to execute well under direction. The team was small, the pace was fast, and the founder’s direct involvement in most decisions meant that the primary quality required of new hires was reliable execution within a defined structure. That model worked for the company’s first phase.
As SPRIBE grew and its founder recognized that his own involvement had become a constraint on organizational speed, the hiring criteria shifted. The company began looking for leaders who had built things before—people with their own perspectives, their own approaches, and the professional confidence to challenge existing thinking rather than simply implement it. “We started looking for leaders who had built things before, who had their own perspectives and approaches,” Natroshvili has said. “That meant hiring people who would challenge my thinking, not just implement my ideas.” That shift requires a particular kind of confidence from a founder: the willingness to bring in people whose judgment may differ from yours, and to accept that as a feature rather than a liability.
Structural Accountability Over Task Assignment
The hiring philosophy change was accompanied by a structural change in how roles were defined. Rather than hiring functional specialists who executed well-defined tasks within a framework set by senior leadership, SPRIBE began hiring leaders who were accountable for entire domains—outcomes, not activities. A leader who owns a domain is responsible for its results regardless of how the work gets done, which requires a different relationship to authority, information, and decision-making than a specialist who completes assigned tasks.
Natroshvili describes his own resulting approach to prioritization in concrete terms: “I prioritise by impact. Every week I identify the two or three initiatives that truly move the needle for SPRIBE, and I make sure they’re on my desk daily. Everything else, I trust my team to handle. That trust isn’t passive. It’s the result of hiring people who don’t need me in the room for decisions to happen.” That last point carries weight. Trust in a team’s autonomy is not something a founder can simply decide to extend; it follows from the quality of the people hired and the clarity of the context provided to them.
When Delegation Does Not Work
The Forbes Australia piece includes Natroshvili’s direct acknowledgment of where this model has fallen short. Delegation is not universally successful, and SPRIBE has experienced cases where people were given autonomy before they were ready for it, or where insufficient oversight allowed projects to drift. “Sometimes people aren’t ready for autonomy. Sometimes projects fail because oversight was too loose,” he has said.
David Natroshvili‘s response to those failures has not been to recentralize decision-making but to invest more deliberately in the systems that make decentralized accountability function: structured dashboards that provide visibility without requiring direct involvement, regular check-ins that are focused and brief rather than sprawling, and in-person gatherings that reinforce shared culture across a geographically distributed team. The insight that emerges from those adjustments is that the alternative to personal control is not absence of oversight—it is oversight through systems and culture rather than through individual attention.
The Listening Practice
One element of Natroshvili’s leadership approach that the Forbes Australia profile highlights is the deliberate cultivation of listening as an organizational practice. As the distance between a CEO and daily operations increases, the information that reaches the executive level can become filtered—shaped by what people assume the leader wants to hear, or compressed by the time constraints of organizational hierarchy. Natroshvili describes making deliberate space for that to not happen.
“I listen. I make space for regular one-on-one conversations where employees can voice concerns, propose ideas, and feel ownership of their work,” he has said. “When people know they’re heard, they’re far more engaged and motivated to perform at their best.” The practical framing he offers is that his role is no longer to have the answers—it is to ask the right questions and build an environment where the people who do have the answers feel empowered to act on them. For a company that ended 2025 with more than 70 million monthly active players and a workforce spanning five countries, the capacity to gather and act on distributed intelligence has become as important as any single decision Natroshvili makes himself.
