Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
tracy.posthaven.com
Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
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Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#2"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players"
In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work.
Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player.
How do B players ever get hired?
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#3Love seeing you back in the game Tracy.
I'm currently knee-deep in the enterprise world, and trust me, the point about selling into these orgs is very true. My team just spent the last year moving our client off a Salesforce Lightning-based solution onto our custom-built one. No one in the org could tell us why they chose to build it in Lightning, but everyone now says they love our solution.
The lessons you learn building a startup are good and always usable, but you need to be ready to learn what it's like to work in and with an enterprise, to figure out how to adapt and sell your product to them. It's an arduous process, but worthwhile.
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#4"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…
The assumption is: "And remember that A players can recruit other A players, …”, not “ "And remember that A players can ONLY recruit other A players, …”.
(Added: My Ph.D. in mathematics is useful for something.)
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#5I got the impression that the 2022 late stage funding implosion was also the death of ARR as a be-all growth metric. It got Goodhart's Law'd to death after all the companies that went public at huge valuations based on ARR turned out to not be as "recurring" as investors would have liked.
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#6"And remember that A players can recruit other A players, but B players can only recruit C players" In point one they list this. In point 3 he mentions his biggest mistake was hiring someone with starpower from a public company who didn't work. Unless the founder is an A player in terms of recruiting everyone hired would be a C player or less. And in point 3 we learn he is not an A player. How do B players ever get h…
The point is that B players have a very hard time ever recruiting A players and actually almost always hire people that are worse than themselves (i.e. c players). This is very true and should be something founders watch out for very carefully as they scale.
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#7A common theme seems to be founders who want to keep all the cool stuff about being a small business while they scale to the ARR of a corporate. It can't happen. 1000 people don't all care about some new feature shipped by someone over in the payments team so don't subject them to it.
Most of us have been there in the painfull all-hands meeting falling asleep because the more people you have, the less they will care about the business. In a a team of 5, I have a lot of skin in the game and also a lot of influence. In a company with 100K employees, most of us are just a cog and some cogs don't even move anything!
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#8Any articles about the failure points from $0 to $5M ARR?
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#9Any articles about the failure points from $0 to $5M ARR?
This please, I think 99% of businesses don’t even get to $5M
Re: Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
#10Ha! one of the slam-your-own-dick-in-the-door moves that startups seem destined to repeat
Seen it SO many times when startups decide they need "grownups" in big positions to be credible externally