3 tips to turbo-charge your hiring
Hiring is key to the success of any business, but it can especially critical for startups. Most founders appreciate the importance of making good hires; however, when a startup is scaling rapidly, process often gets left behind. In our experience, successful recruiting is a combination of process discipline and checks and balances. Here are three […]
The risks of scaling too fast, too soon
While preparing for some recent LP presentations, we took a close look at all of the companies that we exited in Fund I. There were ten exits out of a total of 20 investments. These were all “early exits” with mostly unsatisfactory outcomes for everybody involved, especially the dedicated and talented founders who had poured […]
How to scale hiring without breaking company culture
After a company finds product-market fit and has raised an A Round, it usually starts scaling the team aggressively. This is a critical time: you have already shown that you’re on to something; now it’s all about executing that business model at scale. And that means you need to grow the original team, while keeping […]
How to scale a marketplace
As a marketplace figures out how to bring buyers and sellers together and builds liquidity, the virtuous cycle starts kicking in. The growth of sellers and buyers quickly accelerates. The ultimate goal is that a successful startup grows into a big company. But as you begin to scale, there are new considerations and strategies to […]
How to stay nimble as you scale
I recently spoke with a founder and CEO of a start-up that had just crossed the 200-employee milestone. Like so many others lucky enough to reach that level, he was complaining about how progress was coming to a halt as the organization grew and became more complex. I myself experienced this as COO at AbeBooks. […]