SaaStr Annual Day #1 Recap: 10 Things That Change When You Stop Bootstrapping
Hi we’re Point Nine Capital and we are currently in SF for the awesome SaaStr ’16. For those who cannot attend the event we’ll share recaps…
Hi we’re Point Nine Capital and we are currently in SF for the awesome SaaStr ’16. For those who cannot attend the event we’ll share recaps (like this one). To be kept informed follow us on Medium.
10 Things That Change When You Stop Bootstrapping
Kristen Koh Goldstein — Scalus Founder
1- complexity explodes exponentially when focus expands from building a product to building a company
2- Mythical man month is real. As you add people building the company takes longer.
3- As CEO your second (or third) full time job as recruiter starts immediately and lasts forever.
Hire slow and fire fast: keeping the wrong person for your company can literally kill it, you have to learn to fire fast before disaster comes.
This is also an area where institutional investors can have a big impact => they can make it easier to hire great profiles.
4- As hard as you try to prevent it, culture will change as you grow and battle rhythm becomes harder to maintain
The earlier you have a real company culture the better.
When growing your company you also need to grow your culture. From “family culture” to “village culture”.
5- Ability to discern bus drivers disguised as bus builders will make or break your company
Bus drivers: focused on input (“I did X and Y”) which can bring a lot of “politics” within your company
Bus builders: focused on output (metrics driven) which is what you need
6- Without conscious deliberate change, the founding team risks becoming micro managers that destroys the company from within
7- You may be tempted to bring more hierarchy than needed
8- Helping your people see the big picture must transition from a 1:1 experience to one of systematic scale and consistency
If your team can’t see the big picture they will not execute well against it
9- The tension between empowering the team against the chaos of everyone determining ‘the how’ will consume you
10- Scale is actually more about consistent product or service delivery rather than quality of product or service delivery
