Building the tribe: stage 2 of Blitzscaling
We have product market fit…now what? The name of the tribal game is growth and how to begin to scale. Similar to my takeaways from the family stage, what struck me most in the tribal stage of blitzscaling stem from the people. In the tribal stage, the importance of how to bring people in the organization, and the power of the users, resonated with me the most. What surprised me the most was the ratio between the product scaling and the number of people needed to scale, and associated with this, the role of risk and timing.
As the team starts to grow from just the founders and core product people, the importance of hiring resonated with me, as the people within an organization ultimately set the culture. With Minted, Mariam Naficy talked about the balance of hiring externally and growing individuals within. She made a point about hiring externally in disciplines where your team isn’t as strong, finding experts in areas that internally your team struggles with. However, she also pointed to the value of an individual growing within the organization. Eric Schmidt brought up the importance of not hiring generic people, but rather finding achievers who are smart and can handle stress. He said, “the best people to hire are CFOs who’ve gone bankrupt, because they’ve been through the wars.” Moving forward, I want to make sure I pay special attention to the passionate qualities of potential hires. Within Firefox’s expansion, John Lilly mentioned that when hiring, they paid well, but did not offer the very top salary. This ensured that people wanted to be there not only for the money, but a drive to be at the company and belief in the mission. The processes in which hiring occurs are critical, and in settings where teams are growing in the future, I would make sure that a system was set to hire in people talented in their field, motivated and inspired by the core goal of the company.
While the principles of scaling a team resonated with me, I was simultaneously surprised at the conservative rate in which teams scaled compared to the product scaling. This brought up the interesting relationship between timing and risk. Mariam and Eric both pointed to the fact that you cannot grow everything as fast as possible. When looking back on Google product launches, Eric stated that you can only scale when you have the product right — pointing to small teams with strong leaders who make a product that just barely works. People have to use it, there has to be some certainty and stickiness to the fit, before scaling can occur. Mariam took a conservative approach with Minted regarding scaling (after taking more risk with Eve). By controlling the pace of capital growth and keeping the team smaller at first, she could make iterations to the product model to ensure a secure fit and position in the market. This lean approach allowed Mariam to have more flexibility; for example she was able to break into different verticals by running experiments on the site and iterating. Despite the community growing immensely, their team stayed small.
Minted and Google both found seedlings of product market fit, but they had to get it into the hands of users to make sure their products could scale before their team scaled. When I enter a start up environment, I want to take on the mentality that more people does not necessarily equate with a better product. With a nimble team of between 10 and 100 passionate people, you can make critical product changes and grow the user base, ultimately leading to the best product with the least amount of risk.
