What Happens When Your Team Doubles—and You’re the Only IT Person?
When Cal Krome joined Lyft, there were 250 employees and zero formal IT infrastructure. As the company grew to 450 people, he was still the only person handling support, provisioning, office builds, and automation. The pace was relentless—and the lessons unforgettable.
“I was the first IT person at Lyft. That year was insane—and it shaped how I lead today.”
His experience offers a roadmap for scaling IT in high-growth companies—one where every decision compounds and every system needs to hold under pressure.
Automation Isn’t a Nice-to-Have. It’s Survival.
When you’re the only one holding the infrastructure together, manual work breaks fast. Cal learned early to automate repeatable tasks—from onboarding flows to device setup to access provisioning.
This gave him the bandwidth to focus on strategic decisions while keeping operations smooth for hundreds of users.
Build Infrastructure That Scales with Culture
IT systems don’t just support growth—they shape it. The tools, access policies, and support channels you design at 100 employees influence how your teams communicate at 1,000.
Cal understood this intuitively, building systems that reinforced autonomy and clarity, rather than bottlenecks and gatekeeping.
“What you set up at 100 employees has to last through 1,000.”
Early Choices Earn Long-Term Trust
The credibility IT builds during hypergrowth doesn’t come from putting out fires—it comes from preventing them. By making smart early investments and proving their value, Cal earned trust from execs, peers, and end users alike.
That trust becomes leverage—making it easier to get budget, drive policy change, and advocate for future improvements.
Final Thought: Don’t Wait to Scale. Build Like You’re Already There.
Scaling IT in high-growth companies isn’t just about keeping up—it’s about getting ahead. Cal Krome’s time at Lyft proves that early investments in automation, documentation, and trust can unlock momentum and resilience when everything else is moving fast.
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Based on a podcast interview with Cal Krome, Head of IT at Calm
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