What I Think About, When I Think About Scaling A Startup

Techstars
Techstars
Sep 4, 2018 · 8 min read

by Jenny Lawton, COO of Techstars

One of the benefits of getting older is the perspective that I’ve gained. Experience truly is the great teacher, and to me, this is especially apparent when I think about scaling a startup. Scaling is truly one situation where if you haven’t done it lots of times before, or you don’t surround yourself with kind and thoughtful people who have — or preferably both — you are going to make mistakes that will eat up time, money, relationships, and possibly even your company.

So from an already generous amount of experience, here are my biggest thoughts about scaling your startup.

People are Everything

I can’t overstate this. A business really won’t work without the people. People have the ideas, create the emotions, set the culture and embody the company mission.

Companies are organic, and it’s the people in the company who bring the chaos that brings depth and authenticity to the brand.

Leaders sometimes forget that it’s all about the people. That the people matter. As a company scales and goes through the normal peaks and valleys of growth, it’s easy to lose sight of the role that the people play.

Newton’s 3rd Law

I like to use Newton’s 3rd Law of Physics — “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” — as a metaphor for those peaks and valleys, and the brutal truth that you will have both. For example, if a growth trajectory is “hockey stick, up and to the right” — I know that there is the flip side of just as steep a slope, heading down. Knowing this and preparing for it allows for a throttle on how hot you want the rocket engines to be. The fall to ground from a fast path to the stratosphere can be hard and breathtakingly speedy.

In my opinion, the best way to think about the people in a business is in this context. Fast growth may require a lot more people in advance of scaling systems. But how do you balance the “more people now” need against the knowledge that scaling systems will obviate the need for the people? Is it better to stretch with fewer people, now, so that when we get to scaling systems the number of people are right sized? Or is it better to hire ahead of the curve to maximize the growth and know that the people are there to keep pushing higher?

There aren’t one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, but I can tell you that these are the questions you should be asking during end-of-year budgeting and planning.

Bring Your Self To Work

Sometimes startups lose sight of this as they grow and the numbers inch from 20 to 100 to 500 to 5,000 and beyond. The things that get lost along the way often seem small, but these losses can be disastrous if they cause the company to lose sight of its most important asset, the people. Scaling with consideration of the people is critical. It’s also hard to get the right dynamic — what works one day may not the next. In my mind, the best companies are the ones that:

  • still remember your birthday;
  • have holidays that fit who each person is;
  • allow for real personal time off to recharge, be human and connected with life, and let kids be sick and parents be home with them;
  • recognize that work can almost always be done from home either often or from time-to-time, and understand that people work in different ways and there is no one way to organize and manage time;
  • remember that accountability matters and boundaries are important to respect;
  • treat people like humans and never think of them as cogs in the machine.

Get the 360 Degree View

A lesson that I learn over and over again — let’s just call it a continual learning project — is that input and viewpoints from all around only improve the outcome. To me, this is a “measure often and cut once” approach. It can be maddening and feel slow and cumbersome, but over the years I have found out that taking the extra time and consideration of a 360 degree view makes for better decisions, higher buy in, and stronger outputs.

If I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know

Why does this matter? Don’t many of us know all the different inputs that go into the system to create the output? Often, we do. We know the inputs. But we don’t have the same point of view that someone else’s position or focus may bring to the table.

We often know the top level of an input, but we don’t have the benefit of all the context behind that input. So, while you may know the input that marketing is going to say, “we need to know this information to write a press release,” you quite possibly don’t have all the context behind this input. What does marketing need to write the press release? What does the timing need to be? Who needs to be informed before we send the press release?

Making assumptions for others based on the data that you have on hand means that a healthy dose of those decisions will be tainted with “don’t know what I don’t know.” I always learn and grow and have lightbulb moments when I make sure to get a full 360 view and engagement in process, and I find that the outcome is much stronger as a result.

Process Matters

Process allows for a system to be defined — a function to be created — that is repeatable. Each time you need to do a repeatable task, the process lets you do this without having to create. This leaves more time to amplify, focus on quality, and deliver results. Process also matters when it comes to that full 360 view on things.

Tame the Surly Teenager

Often a startup grows from small to larger without a lot of recognition of the changes and inflection points that take place. Going from 0 to 10 people is relatively easy — 10 people can stay connected and informed with each other pretty intuitively. Going from 10 to 15 is relatively hard and painful. It’s the first time where there’s potential for the company growth to perhaps outstrip some talent, and so there’s room for instability. It’s also a time when there may be some fork in the mission or product and some iteration. It’s a hard stage of growth. Getting to 20 and then 50 is like growing a child into a toddler. If you feed the baby superfoods and it grows fast, you may find that you have a surly teenager to deal with for a long time.

Process and systems really help to tame the surly teenager and to usher it into adulthood in as elegant a way as possible. Process doesn’t need to be a heavy hand — at its basics, it’s a RASCI, a communication protocol, a defined organization, an order of events and transparent sharing of the core values and operational performance of the company.

I like to think that process is what allows a company to stop playing kid soccer — that game that young children play where they all chase the soccer ball around a field together and leave the goalies at each end of the pitch picking daisies — and start playing college or maybe even professional level soccer where each player knows their role and the impact that they can have on team success.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Life is a long process of learning. In order to learn, you need to give yourself time to experience, process, and apply.

When the world is moving fast and there are more deadlines than you can ever imagine making — it’s time to slow down.

Stop. Stop what you are doing. Sit down. Be quiet. Slow your breathing. Stop the cacophony in your brain. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Then, once you are calm and quiet…

Look. What’s going on? What do things look like? Is the view in color? In black and white? Is there armageddon and smoke from fusillade or are the clouds really pink and the sun too sunny? What does the landscape look like?

Listen. What is being said? Who is saying what? And why? Are you absorbing it? Or is it moving past you and through you, or even at you? Really listen.

Once you are able to stop and then look and listen, then you can make the best decisions. It’s far better to slow the world down to where you need to be so that you can make the right decision.

Channel Yoda

It’s a kind of Jedi mind trick. Think Yoda. Channel Yoda when you Stop. Look. Listen. When I play tennis and I’m on either end of a lopsided score, I make myself do this. If I’m up 5–1, I am as much at risk of losing as I am when I am at 1–5. So I make sure that every stroke I make is in the moment. I focus on reading the label on the ball coming at me and keeping my line of sight bounded by the court that I am playing on. I listen to my breathing and watch where the ball goes. It’s a conscious effort to change the dynamics and slow down the moment so that each decision I make is with intention, and matters.

Continuous Contemplation

To wrap my thoughts up, I like to think of everything as a continuous contemplation. Every day I like to think back on what I learned and how to pay that forward. Maybe I made a mistake — what did I learn from it? What would I do differently next time? Or maybe I did something that was great — is that repeatable? Does it make me adjust how I do things going forward? I celebrate the successes of the day and take to ground the failures so that I leave the day with a clear mind to carry forward with.

This is a big picture goal for me, not just for scaling, but as important here as anywhere else in life.

I Love Getting Older

I’ll end where I started. I love getting older. I feel like I may, with luck, actually be getting wiser, about scaling as well as about life. I feel like I have this new window into how things work and a confidence that my world will continue to be full of surprises, wins, losses but most of all, powerful learnings. And I’m grateful that I get to share those learnings with you.

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Techstars is the Worldwide Network That Helps Entrepreneurs Succeed

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Techstars is the Worldwide Network that helps entrepreneurs succeed

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