Understanding Personal “Fit” in High-Performance Startups

Scale as an Input, Not an Output

Thrive in Startup Ambiguity and the Turbulence of Growth

While the objectives, strategy, and challenges of the startup ecosystem are well-published, the perspectives and tools for personal success are, unfortunately, not as well understood. The following is a framework I developed to onboard new talent after finding Product <> Market Fit and raising a Series A round in the Spring of 2019. This is a four-part series on themes extracted from the biggest home-runs and worst strikeouts I’ve seen during the past four years of building zero-to-one at two startups.

Part 1: The Golden Rule, Momentum is Trust
Part 2: Scale as an Input, Not an Output
Part 3: Idea Inclusion & Team Thinking
Part 4: Outcomes & Organization

Part 2: Scale as an Input, Not an Output

Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory predicts that technology investments are more likely to succeed with zero marginal costs — where all of the effort required to build a product is in the upfront development and there is no cost to scale — think of cheap pixels from dot-com and self-serve sales from SAAS disruption. The other side of this coin, however, is that scaling hard things well is actually a key defense to later competition as infinitely scalable solutions have fewer…