The Key to Rapid Growth? Don’t Fear the Pause

Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel, on the importance taking the time to evaluate your startup’s “growing pains” to stay lean.

Who doesn’t want to grow their startup? Every founder is hungry for those hockey stick charts, that massive influx of revenue, and the kind of buzz that makes every engineering genius want to work for them.

But getting too big too fast can lead to reactive decision-making, like hiring because you’re afraid you won’t be able to scale, and other common “success traps” that can break your culture and doom your startup.

Our very own CEO, Suhail Doshi, appears on HubSpot’s The Growth Show this week to talk about a necessary (and unexpected) startup hack:
the pause.

So, what exactly is the pause? Suhail explains:

In 2014, we were 37 people, and then in 2015 we were 120, and in 2016 we were 220. That’s very very fast [growth], and there are good things and bad things that happened along the way. One major thing that we had to talk about was growing pains, internally. The interesting thing that happened was that we figured out that in order to keep lean — when you grow your company — you actually have to psychologically prepare the company for pausing hiring. I think that’s hard for everybody. I think that’s really tough.

One thing people do sometimes is they hire [by selling prospect on] the opportunity for growth. And there’s actually an issue with that, which is if you exclusively hire people [based upon] on growth, you self-select for the wrong people during a tough time — or a time when you decide to stop hiring for a little bit — because they feel like their own career prospects are stunted.

By pausing you give everyone a break. You’re giving yourself a break to go,“Is the culture what we want it to be?” Because it’s easy to break your culture by hiring a lot of people, I think every CEO and every founder has to align [with leadership] and say, “Let’s pause.”

The interview covers a lot of ground, from what matters most in mobile, to how Max Levchin got involved as an investor, to the little-known story about how Mixpanel was almost a gaming startup.

Check out the podcast here, exclusively from our friends at HubSpot’s The Growth Show!