Tag Archives: growth

10/9/21

The Three Year Itch, The Second Scale

If you are a startup that has survived for three years, have a substantial gross revenue, are EBITDA positive, are GAAP earnings profitable, and have an attractive annual growth rate — CONGRATULATIONS.

You are a top 1-5% startup company and now you face the Three Year Itch or the Second Scale issue.

The problem is this —

 1. You are as busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. Everybody is working their butt off. You can feel the effort in the air. Taste it. You are proud, but exhausted.

 2. Noting the above, you feel the need to add hands and person hours to the organization — maybe, just to relieve the perceived burden currently. Belay that thought.

In your exhaustion, you are struggling to figure out how. Perfectly normal, sorry.

 3. You want to grow — double in sales in the next 2-3 years [in my mind, you are in the $10MM range headed to $25MM in Year 3 of the New Plan (meaning Year 6 from founding)].

 4. You are clearly a powerful entrepreneur, but you have no idea how to handle the next three years — you had no idea how to form a company and take it to market, but you seem to have knocked it out of the park, so do not fret.

 5. You are going to do this thing. Why not do it under control? Continue reading →

03/9/20

CEO Shoptalk — Staffing

The subject of how companies staff their businesses, manage their employees, and administer the employer-employee relationship has been lingering in my mind for some considerable time. Today, I will try to put some order to it. Staffing.

At the core of every business is people. It starts with the founder(s) and then grows. A company cannot grow without being a capable employer, but little is said as to the system by which that happens.

Allow me to jump ahead. Assume:

 1. You are a founder/CEO who now has some semblance of a product, are struggling with product-market fit, have raised a bit of capital, and will have to hire people to drive and scale the business.

 2. Assume, in the alternative, you are a founder/CEO who has more than 50 employees, plenty of money in the bank, have achieved product-market fit, have 1,000 customers, and are now ready to really scale.

I use these two examples because I hope the logic is universal.

Continue reading →

05/23/19

Hot Tech Times in Austin By God Texas

Austin. When you hear that word, you want to be here. You want Barton Springs, the music scene, the Texas Longhorns, the food scene, the local beers, breakfast tacos, and you want the high tech scene.

Here it is. Barton Springs, at 68F, is natural air conditioning on the hottest day in Austin.

Main Barton Spring (“Parthhena, the “mother spring”) — the 4th largest spring in Texas — and its sisters generate more than 32MM cubic feet per day of Edwards Aquifer water. Highest flow rate ever recorded was 85MM CFS during the infamous 1991 floods. In times of drought, the flow rate may be lower. All water from the Edwards is rain water.

Image result for images barton springs austin

While Barton Springs is cold and refreshing, while the Austin tech scene is hot and exciting. The following chart is the work of crunchbase news and its Austin author, Mary Ann Azevedo. She writes about Austin and lives in Austin.

Continue reading →

02/21/19

Scaling Talent in a Growing Startup

Today we talk about how a company scales its talent as the company grows. Can it be done? What do you need to watch for?

So, a conversation that recurs from time to time is this — the talent with which you found and initially grow a company may not be strong enough to grow the company in the mid to long term, and get to the Promised Land.

When you are a band of brothers or sisters, it is beguiling to believe that you have the right mix of people to grow the company to its ultimate size.

This is how co-founders think of themselves when they first found the company. They are killers, happy, genial killers, but still killers. Look at these sweet co-founders.

Image result for images of lions

Beguiling.

Continue reading →

01/29/19

Making Progress in the Real World of Startups

Big Red Car here on a crisp, sunny Texas winter day. It is 40F, which is bone chilling cold in the ATX.

So, the BRC is talking to a couple of CEOs and they are describing their growth curve–from founding to launch to the Promised Land. All of them have made it to the pay window, a nice arrival point.

It was an interesting discussion and one you might want to have with yourself.

In an ideal situation — something that never, ever happens — fictitious growth might look something like this. You are looking at performance over a period of time. We all want it to be high and to the right. Performance appears to increase at a uniform rate, at a steady rate. Not very realistic?

Continue reading →