International expansion can be a powerful growth lever — or an expensive distraction. Through my product leadership lens, I’m always looking for patterns that separate the former from the latter. Recently, I reflected on insights from Max Rhodes to distill a practical, founder-friendly playbook for going global without losing focus.
Max Rhodes is the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and brands. His vantage point is especially useful for product leaders scaling multi-sided marketplaces and navigating complex cross-border dynamics.
Prior to starting Faire in 2017, Max spent several years at Square, where he was a founding member of Square Capital, the first product manager on Square Cash, and a Director of Consumer Product for Caviar.
In today’s conversation, we dive deep into how startups can get international expansion right. After launching in the U.K. and Netherlands in March 2021, Faire company expanded into countries like France, Germany, Italy and the Nordic region. They’re now in 15 markets, with over 700 employees in 10 offices around the world.
After sharing the company’s origin story and initial strategy, Max offers a helpful analogy that helped him decide when to go international, and details some lessons he learned from other companies like DoorDash and Airbnb. I found his decision framework refreshingly practical — a blend of timing, readiness, and strategic focus that maps well to the realities of product-market fit, capital efficiency, and operational maturity. I’ve used similar mental models to pressure-test when our roadmap should shift from depth in one market to breadth across many.
Next, Max takes us through the nuts and bolts of how the Faire team approached their first international launch, from staffing and operations, to how they thought about local competitors. Max also walks us through the operating cadence and strategic planning process that powered Faire’s international growth. We also talk about the human side of scaling internationally, and the growing pains that come along with it. What resonated with me was the balance between a disciplined operating rhythm — clear goals, tight feedback loops, and cross-functional ownership — and a nuanced, market-by-market go-to-market strategy that respects local competitors and customer behaviors.
To help mitigate the effects, Max shares how he’s implemented the concepts from the First Round Review article on “Giving away your Legos.” Read the article here: https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups I’ve leaned on this mindset during hypergrowth — encouraging PMs, GMs, and functional leaders to continually redesign their roles so we can scale scope without calcifying decision-making. The emotional lift is real, but the payoff is a more resilient organization that can execute across time zones and product surfaces.
Here’s how I translate these lessons into an actionable international expansion checklist for product leaders: validate pull (authentic customer demand and repeatable GTM motion), ensure supply and liquidity for marketplaces, map the competitive landscape by customer jobs (not features), stand up a clear operating cadence with measurable outcomes (not just output-based OKRs), hire for local context and cross-functional ownership, and define a fast, lightweight process for localizing product, pricing, and support. When those pieces click, international expansion compounds rather than distracts.
You can follow Max on Twitter at @MaxRhodesOK.
Inspired by this post on First Round.
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