Can a sinking start-up reaccelerate growth?
Conventional wisdom, at least in VC land, is that no start-up sees a reacceleration of growth. Once the growth curve starts heading down, it only sees a downward slope. This is partly due to the law of big numbers: a bigger denominator makes it harder and harder to keep up year-over-year growth rates. Things get […]
How Indiegogo Grew its Business
This is the fourth and final post covering speakers’ insights from our marketplace meetup held in San Francisco on October 20. If you haven’t already, check out previous posts detailing Andrew Chen’s (Uber) fireside chat on growth strategies, Anthony Marino’s (ThredUp) talk on managed marketplaces, and B2B marketplace dynamics from Shippo’s Mikhail Ledvich. The first […]
Growth strategies for marketplaces: key takeaways from a fireside chat on growth
Last week I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Andrew Chen for a fireside chat on growth strategies as part of the Version One marketplace meetup. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended the event – coming from as far as South Africa and Nova Scotia. As an investor and former founder, […]
Play your own playbook
Given the frequency of media stories focused on a handful of startups with billion dollar valuations and high profile rounds, it’s understandable that founders get impatient with their own company’s natural pace of growth. This sense of urgency is intensified by the fact that growth is an elemental part of being a startup. Paul Graham […]
Growth versus capital efficiency
I often see two entrepreneurs executing on similar opportunities, but with two very different capital efficiencies. First, there’s the aggressive one who spends money very quickly, building a large team, buying early growth through aggressive marketing and sales, and hoping for a large upround in the next financing round. Then, there’s the bootstrapping entrepreneur who […]