Building A Strong Foundation for Growth

The Venture Kills journey continues. After spending three episodes on why you should Never Take Money from a VC, I’ve switched gears to a slightly more serious topic. The focus of the new series is on the building blocks founders should put in place to ensure their companies have a strong foundation for growth. The focus is not on systems or processes but on people. I’m not sure how many more episodes I’ll do in this series yet (I’ll definitely do at least one more), but I thought it would be worth a quick review of what I’ve covered so far on this topic.

The first episode in the series covers how you can ensure your business becomes more agile as you grow versus getting dumber and slower. This is a topic I get asked about all the time from founders who like the feel of their small company and they worry it will feel worse as they add more people. Values-based growth is one of my favorite topics that I’ve written about in the past, but I cover it from a different angle this time. As I say in the video “A business is comprised of a group of people making decisions” so if you want to have your business get better as you scale, you need a system for hiring people who will make the right decisions for your business.

Episode 2 in the series covers how to become a better leader. More specifically, I cover how to get the most out of every person on your team. Hopefully, we can all agree that getting the most from your team members will increase your probability of success. You may not agree with my method but you won’t know unless you watch.

This next topic I have in mind for this series will definitely cause some controversy. I’m recommending the reversal of a very popular startup trend that sounds awesome but can result in real limitations as you scale. As always, thanks for watching and keep the feedback coming