Forty days, and the list of assumptions
Priya doesn't say much about the specific moment the decision to open London got made. She'll say only that the timeline she was given was forty days, that her company had no UK entity, no UK counsel, no London lease, and zero employees in the United Kingdom, and that by Monday morning of that week she had a project plan, three vendor RFPs out, and a one-page document she described as the list of assumptions hidden inside the sentence.
The list ran to forty-one items. Some were small — a London phone number, a UK Slack workspace, a desk for the first hire who didn't exist yet. Some were the kind of thing that, missed, would mean the office didn't actually open. A bank account that could pay UK payroll. A registered office address that wasn't a serviced-office hot desk. HMRC registration. PAYE setup. National Insurance. A Director of the UK entity who was a real person and not just an American name on a document.
The most important meeting of the forty days, Priya says, wasn't an execution meeting. It was the conversation inside the principal's office where she walked through which of the forty-one assumptions were going to break, and surfaced them early enough that the office could choose around them. That conversation happens once. After it, the work begins.
"My job is not to execute someone else's plan. My job is to find the assumptions inside the plan that will break, and surface them in time for the office to choose differently."
The vendor stack she built from scratch
Priya did not have a vendor stack for international expansion when the project started. Her company had operated in one city for four years. The contractors she used in Boston — the small-firm employment counsel, the fractional accountant, the corporate housing agent she could text on a Sunday — none of them worked in London. By the end of week one she had built a parallel UK stack, sourced almost entirely from warm intros to peers at three other Boston companies who had opened London offices in the last two years.
"Every chief of staff at every company that had done this before me knew exactly which firms to call," she says. "Nobody had written it down. The whole craft of opening a London office for an American startup lives in a WhatsApp group of about forty people."
She wrote it down. By day forty, the London playbook ran to twenty-six pages. It is now the single most-circulated document in her people-ops drive — the playbook every future country expansion will start from.
The decision she'd reverse
On day twenty-eight, the keystone hire fell through. The plan, as constructed, had no backup. Priya had two options: delay the opening by six weeks while a new search ran, or open the office on schedule with a contractor in the seat for the first ninety days. She chose the contractor.
"I'd reverse that decision today," she says. "The contractor was fine. The contractor was actually great. But the office opened without an owner, and for the first ninety days every escalation came back to me, in Boston, on Eastern time, while the office was running on UK time. I was the de facto London general manager for three months from a desk in Cambridge. That cost me other things on my plate."
"The right move was to delay six weeks. The lesson is that schedule pressure makes you choose the wrong tradeoff in the moment, and you can only see it after."
What she'd outsource
The closer: what part of your job would you outsource if a vendor existed?
"The international-entity-setup piece," she says. "Deel handles the employment side, but it doesn't handle the entity. Pilot handles the bookkeeping, but it doesn't handle the registered office. There's a gap in the middle — the actual mechanics of standing up a foreign subsidiary as an American Series B — that I had to figure out myself. Forty companies a year do this. None of them share notes. Somebody should build that vendor."
Topics covered
- How a Series B fintech opened a London office in forty days
- The vendor stack assembled from a WhatsApp group of peer chiefs of staff
- What breaks when the keystone hire falls through
- The twenty-six-page playbook now circulated company-wide