Great companies do not come around by coincidence. They consist of a careful mix of critical ingredients and if any of those are missing, they typically do not happen. Luck is a small part of the equation if a part at all.
From experience with hyper-growth companies, there are clear common elements amongst them – call it the the 4-genome DNA of hyper growth companies:
1. Have the dream team at any stage of a companies life. Although people can learn, you generally will want to grow your company faster than people can learn and as a result of the fast changing requirements of those companies, you will need to add new skill sets to the company as you go through its development phases
2. Work at an incredibly high clock frequency. All companies we have been involved in that were on hyper-growth worked at a much faster clock frequency than most companies around them. They simply did more things – and even if some of those things failed, the amount of things that worked out was still so high that they got much more done and moved faster than other companies – and as a result they won.
3. Focus on what you are best at and use partners to do the rest. Pretty much every hyper-growth company has grown on the back of one or two large partnerships early on. Focus your company on the unique thing that you can do better than anyone in the world and then find the right partners that need that and can bring you the vast majority of the “complete product” that customers will need – because they have done that many times before and thus can do that better than you can but at the same time they need that nugget that you have and they don´t.
4. Combine a long-term plan with short-term objectives in your company culture. A company needs to have a long term vision of where it is going. And to be clear – we believe that in tech, long term is 3-5 years; seeing beyond that is too hard to do. But that is not enough; to get things done a team needs to translate that long term plan into short term (quarterly) objectives so that everyone knows what they are working towards at any specific point in time.
Unlike in our own natural DNA that we are born with and can not (at least not yet) be changed, all these elements of company DNA can be created. The goal is to bring past experience with similar companies to new companies that have the aim and passion to become hyper-growth companies themselves.
