Startup Growth

We recently held our annual CEO summit where 65 of our portfolio company CEOs came together in NYC. Because we had updated our thesis since last year’s summit, we wanted to share some of our thinking with the group around trusted brands, one of the newer concepts added to the thesis. Below is the deck we shared with the CEOs last week. It spurred a great conversation at the summit and we hope it will bring up some interesting ideas and conversations for you too.

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

A go-to-network (GTN) strategy is a plan that details how an organization can grow and engage networks of potential customers in order to build connections and authentic relationships, and ultimately convince them to buy their product or service. 

GTN will enable your company to grow faster and more efficiently by leveraging the power of your networks of employees, customers, fans, community members, and more. 

The approach includes tactics related to product-led growth, community building, leveraging events, personal branding, and other forms of network building.

Modern growth strategies are all go-to-network

At their core, all these growth strategies have the same underlying philosophy. Implicitly or explicitly, they set out to foster deeper connections between the company and a specific network