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How Startups Reach New Levels of Growth
You can’t scale up until you tear things down
The tricky thing about startup success is it doesn’t happen in a straight line.
Look at Amazon, look at Etsy — hell — look at Apple, and compare what those companies are today with what they were at their startup stage. You probably wouldn’t have put much faith into those early companies.
Further, the products from those nascent startups — books shipped to your home, eBay for hipsters, and personal computers for artists—would have failed miserably had they remained in their original state. In fact, Apple came back from the dead more than once.
What successful founders understand about startup growth
You can chart almost any metric related to startup growth, and from a distance, that chart will look like it goes up and to the right in a nice smooth line. But when you look a little closer, you’ll start to see all the peaks and valleys of a sawtooth growth line, with plenty of exciting ups and terrifying downs.
I’ve been building companies and products for over 20 years now, and sawtooth growth has been one of the hardest entrepreneurial concepts to wrap my brain around. Luckily, I got early lessons in how to deal with the risks associated with those ups and downs.
These days, I seek them out.
Once I got a few successes and failures under my belt, I realized that sawtooth growth should happen on purpose. In other words, you can’t scale up until you tear things down.
A little success is actually bad for you
One bit of advice I give myself constantly — and I preach this to every founder and executive I advise: A taste of success can do more harm than good, especially early success.
Early in my career, I founded the first social network and publishing platform for writers, Intrepid Media, which blasted out of the gate in the early 2000s. The ride featured immediate profitability, unchecked growth, parties in New York and Las Vegas, and we even produced not one but two New York Times bestselling authors.
