High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People

In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric.

We are in a product cycle business. Which is to say that every product in tech becomes obsolete, and they become obsolete pretty quickly. If all you do is take your current product to market and win the market, and you don’t do anything else—if you don’t keep innovating—your product will go stale. And somebody will come out with a better product an

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person A great deal person is not usually a great partner manager An interview with MARIAM NAFICY CHAPTER 5: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND HYPERGROWTH

That’s why secondaries probably shouldn’t happen for seed and A and B companies. But generally it’s C and up now where you’re starting to see it quite commonly. Even in B-round cases, you’ll see it if the company’s made substantial progress.

By the time a given company is worth $1 billion or more, the CEO and board should start to think of M&A as a serious tool for accelerating the company’s progress and valuation. For example, at $1 billion market cap, a $10 million acquisition is just 1% of your startup’s equity. If the acquisition can increase your valuation by just 10%, then it

As a founder, you get a couple of shots on goal in your life. And you might even only have one for that thing you’re really super passionate about. I think good VCs now realize that if they’re going to ask you to go for the billion-dollar exit, then they have to be willing to let you take some off the table along the way. So I think the secondary c

I think future companies, especially those that haven’t raised money yet or haven’t raised substantial capital or haven’t gotten product/market fit even loosely, when they’re hiring early employees, they’re really just hiring late founders. And so they should be giving 1, 2, 3, 4% of the company, instead of giving 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4%. The issue wit

Right now is the lowest-risk time ever to be a founder. You can go into an accelerator and roll the dice, see where it goes. You can get some money, see where it goes. There’s very little risk to being a founder. But early employees are asked to take founder-level risk, because the companies often don’t have product/market fit, without getting foun