I've hired a CEO

Read this on victoriaprew.com​

Read time: 2.5 minutes

Hey! Happy Monday.

Six years ago I started HURR from my bedroom. I was 25. I had complete conviction that the fashion industry was broken and that the rental model was the fix. What followed: $10 million raised in venture capital at a time when just 2% of VC funding globally went to female founders. The UK's largest fashion rental marketplace. A top lender who has just made £200,000 renting out her wardrobe. Rental technology powering the biggest retailers and brands in the country. A team that proved the future of fashion is circular before it was fashionable to say so.

It was the ride of my life. And then I made the decision most founders are too scared to make.

I promoted our COO, Lauren, into the CEO role. Someone who had been building HURR alongside me for years. Someone who runs toward the things that make the company exceptional at this next stage. HURR is not in safe hands. It is in the right hands. And I'm going all in on what comes next!

TODAY AT A GLANCE

• Replacing yourself as CEO is not failure. For most founders, it is the highest-leverage financial decision available.
• The best founders know which stage they are built for, then hire the person built for the next one.
• A few of the lessons I've learned along the way.

[the concept]

The Data Most Founders Never Look At

Harvard studied 212 startups. Less than 25 percent of founder-CEOs led their company to IPO. Founders who brought in professional leadership built more valuable companies than those who held on. 50 percent of founders are no longer CEO by year three. This is not a failure statistic. It is a pattern.

Harvard called it the rich versus king trade-off. You can have control. Or you can have growth. Most founders cannot fully have both. Sara Blakely hired a CEO two years after founding Spanx. She started with $5,000 dollars. She exited at $1.2 billion.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin did it. Jeff Bezos did it. The best founders know when to find someone better. That is not failure. That is the job.

The role changes as you scale. Early stage: vision, speed, survival. At scale: process, structure, operational discipline. These are completely different skill sets. The best founders know which one they are, then hire accordingly. I know which one I am.

You can read the full research here, or I really enjoyed reading this book.

[the framework]

10 Rules For Building Company #2

01. Build audience before you build product. Company one, I built the product first and found the audience after. I spent two years convincing people a problem existed. Company two, I'm flipping this. Your audience is your market research, your beta testers, and your first customers. Distribution is the asset. The product fills the gap they tell you exists.

Your action: Before you build anything, spend 30 days creating content about the problem you want to solve. Watch what gets engagement. The comments and DMs tell you what to build. Only build what your audience is already asking for.

02. Validate before you build anything. Pre-sell. Run a paid pilot. Get someone to put their card down before you spend a single pound on design. If ten strangers will not pay for the idea, ten thousand will not either. Traction is the only proof investors and customers actually care about.

Your action: Write your offer in one sentence. Does it solve a painful, specific problem? Run a paid pilot with 5 to 10 people before building the full product. No payment, no build.

03. Keep costs so low it is almost embarrassing. Low fixed costs are not a weakness. They are the strategy. In 2026 a lean operator with a sharp offer and an AI stack can outrun a twenty-person team. Your burn rate is your runway. Your runway is your freedom.

Your action: List every cost in your business. Ask: does this generate revenue or protect it? Before hiring a human, ask whether an AI tool can do it first. No new fixed cost without a clear revenue justification.

04. Build systems before you need them. Company one taught me this the hard way. Revenue went up. Stress went up with it. Because the systems came after the growth, not before. Build the operating rhythm, the decision rights, the feedback loops before the spike arrives. Structure is not boring. Structure is the thing that stops you losing your mind when it all accelerates.

Your action: Map your three most repeated tasks this week. Write a simple SOP for each one. Set a weekly 30-minute review: what broke, what needs fixing before next week? Ask yourself: if I stepped away for two weeks, what would collapse? Fix that first.

05. Own your audience. Never rent it. Social platforms are landlords. Your newsletter is the only asset you actually own. Every follower on Instagram or LinkedIn sits on someone else's land. Move people into your email list as fast as possible. That list compounds. An algorithm does not. One platform change should never be able to take your business down.

Your action: Set up your email list today if you have not already. Add a lead magnet to every piece of content you publish this week. Track your list growth weekly. Treat it like a revenue metric, because it is.

06. Build in public. Sharing the journey is not vulnerability. It is distribution. The founders who build in public attract customers, collaborators, and press without spending a pound on ads. Your process is your content. Your lessons are your marketing. And your personal brand will outlast every business you build.

Your action: Write one post this week about something you learned building your business. Not a highlight. A real moment. Pick one platform and show up consistently for 90 days before judging the result.

07. Hire AI before you hire humans. Before you post a job description, ask: can an AI tool do this? In 2026 a well-designed AI stack can replace roles that used to cost six figures a year. Hire AI for speed, repetition, and scale. Hire humans for judgment, relationships, and the things that genuinely require a soul. The operators who understand this distinction will run micro-teams doing the work of departments.

Your action: List the five tasks you do most often. Which of those require human judgment? For every task that does not, find an AI tool or automation this week. Audit your stack every quarter.

08. Pick one metric and move it every week. Not ten goals. One number. Users, revenue, signups, whatever it is for your stage. It should be painfully obvious on a Friday whether you moved it or not. If you cannot answer that question, you are not building. You are busy. Those are not the same thing.

Your action: Choose your one metric for this quarter. Write it at the top of your weekly review. Every Monday: what is the one action this week that moves that number most? Every Friday: did it move? Be brutally honest.

09. Your personal brand is your moat. The business can be copied. You cannot. In a world where AI can replicate most products in a weekend, the founder who has built trust, authority, and a genuine point of view wins. Visibility is no longer a vanity project. It is a business strategy. In 2026, how AI systems read and rank your brand matters as much as how humans do.

Your action: Write your point of view in one sentence. What do you believe that your industry does not? Make that belief the thread that runs through every piece of content you publish. Reputation compounds. Start building it before you think you need it.

10. Design the life before you design the business. This is the rule I wish I had known first. Company one was built around the business goals. Company two is being built around the life I want. What does a genuinely good week look like? Who do you want to spend your days with? What are you trading your time for? The business should fund the life. Not replace it.

Your action: Write down what a perfect week looks like for you. Not the business. You. Does your business, as currently designed, make that week possible? If not, what changes? Build the life plan before the business plan. Then make sure one serves the other.

[the lesson]

What Comes Next

I am going into stealth on what comes next. I am not ready to share the details publicly yet. What I will say: it is a business I believe must exist. One I cannot stop thinking about. One that connects everything I have learned about building, acquiring, and scaling.

The 10 rules above are the operating system I am running on for company number two. They represent everything I know from building company one and everything I am doing differently this time. Copy them!

Until next week,

Victoria