Small teams

Network effects of success : Silicon Valley is famous for its “mafias.” As companies sell or IPO for billions of dollars, they make many of their employees very wealthy. Those employees form new companies, support each other, and invest in the next generation of companies. ThePayPal Mafia, Silicon Valley’s most famous, includes entrepreneurs who w

Fundraising is an integral part of the success story of billion-dollar startups, and it is true that a large portion of the ones I studied had an easy time raising money, round after round, from brand-name investors. Yet startups that didn’t enjoy this level of attention from top VCs were also able to achieve billion-dollar outcomes.

GitHub grew as a bootstrapped company for over four and a half years; the first fundraising it underwent was a $100 million series A round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, skipping many rounds of financing and dilutions that come with it. Three years later GitHub raised a $250 million series B, led by Sequoia Capital, and in June 2018 Microsoft acquire

We also recognize that the number of employees is only one of several measures of an organization’s scale. Some of the other measures of scale include the number of users (user scale), the number of customers (customer scale), and total annual revenues (business scale). These measures usually, but don’t always, move in lockstep. While it’s nearly i