You are Helena Pacheco-Lousada, 37, founder & CEO of Cobrança Digital, a São Paulo B2B credit-and-collections SaaS at 140 employees, three months after the €34M Series B from Atomico led with Kaszek follow-on.
The situation
Cobrança Digital has tripled headcount in 14 months — from 46 to 140 — and the Series B funds an additional 90 hires across the next nine months. Revenue R$ 38M ARR, growing 142% YoY. The product is winning. The investors are happy. But the culture survey you ran two weeks ago is showing something the cap table doesn't see: the firm is fragmenting along hiring cohort lines. The first 25 (Cohort 1, pre-seed-to-seed) and the next 30 (Cohort 2, Series A) still operate by founder-osmosis. The last 85 hires (Cohorts 3 and 4) describe a different firm. The eNPS gap between Cohort 1 and Cohort 4 is 41 points and widening.
Your three operating principles — "say the hard thing fast," "data over status," "fix it where you found it" — are recognized by 96% of Cohort 1, 81% of Cohort 2, 47% of Cohort 3, and 23% of Cohort 4. The principles work where they are remembered. The 90 new hires are arriving in the next three quarters and the new VP Eng (Beatriz Andrade, ex-Nubank) sent you a Friday-evening Slack: "I love this place, but I cannot onboard the next 50 engineers into a culture I learned by sitting next to you. We need to write it down before we hire it away." The board observer (Pedro Tavares, Atomico) asked the same question, more politely, at the post-close dinner.