High growth handbook
Kindle Highlights: High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People
Highlights
the main thing becomes taking the market—which is to say, figuring out how to get the product to the entire market, how to get dominant market share; because most tech markets tend to end up with one company with most of the market share. — location: 347
building an organization, a model, and a distribution capability that can actually get the product to all the customers is an intense challenge. — location: 354
Number two is getting to the next product. — location: 357
contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel. — location: 369
the third thing you need to do is what I call “everything else,” which is building the company around the product and the distribution engine. That means becoming competent at finance, HR, legal, marketing, PR, investor relations, and recruiting. — location: 375
between 50 to 150 people. It’s somewhere in there. If you don’t start layering in HR once you’ve passed 50 people on your way to 150, something is going to go badly wrong. — location: 392
early adopters are only ever a small percentage of the overall market. And so a lot of founders, especially technical ones, will convince themselves that the rest of the market behaves like the early adopters, which is to say that the customers will find them. And that’s just not true. — location: 409
true defensibility purely at the product level is really rare in the Valley, — location: 454
At some point, whoever has the distribution engine and gets 100% of the market, at some point that engine itself is a moat. Again, that might be an enterprise sales team for a SaaS company, or it might be the growth team at a consumer company. — location: 459
The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more. And so number one, it’s just a good way to flesh out that topic and really expose it to sunlight. And then number two, companies that charge more can better fund both their distribution efforts and their ongoing R&D efforts. Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster. — location: 468
two-dimensional mindset, where higher prices equals faster growth. — location: 476
people emphasize network effects and data effects way too much, and I’ve never seen a real data effect, at least recently. — location: 481
The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously. Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going. Network effects can create a very strong position, for obvious reasons. But in another sense, it’s a very weak position to be in. Because if it cracks, you just unravel. I always worry when a company thinks the answer is just network effects. How durable are they? — location: 484
hierarchies kill innovation for the most part. And I think that matrixes are just lethal in most cases. There are exceptions, but in most cases, you need original thinking and speed of execution, and it’s really hard to get that in anything other than a small-team format, in my view. — location: 523
The CEO: Sets the overall direction and strategy of the company and communicates this direction regularly to employees, customers, investors, etc. Hires, trains, and allocates company employees against this overall direction while maintaining company culture. Raises and/or allocates capital against this overall direction. Acts as chief psychologist of the company. Founders are often surprised by the extent to which people and organizational issues start to dominate their time. Many — location: 534
tactical duties of a CEO that often go under-discussed: how to manage yourself, your reports, and your board of directors. — location: 540
The very best executives tend to be a combination of a router (i.e., they send items on to other people for execution and end meetings with few to no action items for themselves), a strategist, and a problem solver (i.e., someone who can identify when the team is off track and dive in to help). — location: 552
Get a formal or informal mentor. — location: 558
Once you are at about 30 people, you should hold a weekly staff meeting. Schedule a regular weekly time. Review key metrics. Be ready with a set of key topics for discussion on broader company or product strategy or key issues a functional area faces. — location: 652
hold skip-level meetings without your reports feeling threatened. — location: 667
I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be one of the pieces I’m describing, to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.” That’s super powerful. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it’s too late. — location: 703
The hard part is that most people want to just do the first part, which is figure out what the company should do. In practice, time-wise, I think the job is 5% that and 95% making sure that it happens. And the annoying thing to many CEOs is that the way you make it happen is incredibly repetitive. It’s a lot of the same conversation again and again with employees or press or customers. You just have to relentlessly say, “This is what we’re doing, this is why, and this is how we’re going to do it.” And that part—the communication and the evangelizing of the company vision and goals—is time-wise by far the biggest part of the job. — location: 1906