Thread by @rickpastoor

I can't recommend the book High Growth Handbook by @eladgil enough. This is a thread with my favorite quotes and some thoughts.

Buy the book (it is beautiful in psysical form), but you can also read it in it's entirely for free, online: growth.eladgil.com

I love the idea of being in a product cycle business. It is not enough anymore to build a product that reaches product/market fit: you need to keep innovating, otherwise someone else will displace you.

We need to become 'product machines'. Coming up with a successful idea is one thing, but building a company that can do this multiple times is a whole different ballgame.

Marc Andreessen on pricing: "I'm always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices."

"Raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have moat. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more."

"Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow." Because with more money, you can better fund both distribution efforts, ongoing R&D, spend more on sales and marketing and so on. You're more likely to win the market with this strategy.

"Higher prices equals faster growth"

If you talk about growth, inevitably the Dropbox-example on virality will pop up. I loved this quote: "Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going".

"The network effect is great while it lasts, but when they reverse, they reverse quickly." It is an interesting perspective (and second order effect, so it's easy to overlook!), that while it's great to have a strong network effect, you should be cautious if you're reliant on it.

The simplest way to scale successful product execution: "You basically want to have autonomous teams, where each team is guaranteed to have a great product person and a great architect. And that’s the model." (but actually not simple at all, because find great people is hard)

Andreessen: "Even at really, really big companies, they don't have a large number of great product persons and great architects. Might be ten or twenty each, maybe." Know who they are and build the rest of your org around them.

The chapter on how to be a good CEO is refreshingly crisp:

The CEO sets the overall direction
The CEO hires, trains and allocates company employees against this direction
The CEO raises capital
The CEO acts as chief psychologist of the company (takes care of issues, basically)

As a CEO (or leader of a company in high growth) it's key to realise that your old way of operating your personal time management will no longer work and needs to drastically change (and probably needs to change every six months).

"The best executives end meetings with few to no action items for themselves."

How to become better at delegating? "You need to build some pattern recognition for when someone is starting to flail or when people have more slack in their time."

This needs to be said more: "Get a mentor."

This also needs to be said more: "Get an executive coach."

A sign that your delegating is not going well: "You feel the need to jump in on every email thread or attend every meeting across the company."

"Audit your calendar regularly." The goal: check on priorities and eliminate time-wasting activities.

The book contains a great interview with Claire Hughes Johnson, where she shares her "Working with Claire" document. "I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it's too late."

"Once you have traction with some core product, you should be able to say: here are our short-, medium- and long-term goals to really build this out."

Creating a set of "founding documents" can be super helpful: "Important for any company to have, especially as you get beyond, say, 50 or 100 people. That includes your mission statement and your vision, but also your overarching long-term goals."

"You need to codify a set of principles and behaviors and then cohere to them, culturally."

"Build the muscle of stopping to plan and think ahead, of creating objectives and measuring progress."

Johnson: "That's my view: you need planning structures earlier than you think, and they should proceed all the way from the top down."

The "Working with Claire" part is so good. Just read it in full here: growth.eladgil.com/book/the-role-…

"I would always take a lower valuation in order to work with a board member or VC partner I really like, rather than a higher valuation and a lesser board member."

"Your board members are optimally people that you wish you could hire for the company, that are truly out of reach otherwise."

On choosing additions to your board: "What are the key zones of expertise, networks, ways of thinking that add the most value into the company that you couldn't hire for?" and "What's really adding to the company and adding to the CEO?"

"You (as CEO) want to guide the board and guide the company."

A board is a committee. "No committee ever built anything great."

When you have to discuss a hard topic with the board "have individual conversations ahead of time". In my experience this goes for any difficult discussion with a team. That should not be the first step.

On hiring: "For each candidate for a given role, ask the same or similar interview questions. This will allow you to calibrate candidates across identical questions."

"You should referencecheck everyone."

Not sure about a candidate? "The right strategy is to not hire the person. “If there is a doubt, there is no doubt” unfortunately proves itself to be true over and over again."

"Send a welcome letter to the new employee—and cc all the teams that person will be working with closely. The letter will explain the person, their role, who they will report to, what their goals are for the quarter."

"Include a book on management the company aspires to emulate, a T-shirt or hoodie, and if they have a newborn leave them a onesie. You can also have a handwritten (or signed) note welcoming the individual to the company."

As an old-timer at Blendle myself, it is important to realize that there is a large chance roles and influence will shrink in the short- to medium-term as the team scales (when in high growth).

"The people who deal with that—the people who deal with the role definition becoming narrower and more focused and are able to faithfully transition through that—are the ones that grow with the company."

"Most of the time press feels great and delivers nothing."

On speaking events: "A lot of founders fall in love with that. It's not that hard and you get to travel and your company pays for it. And you feel special. The point that I always try to make is that it's important to do very small amounts of that. Less is more."

"When hiring executives, look for people who have the experience and background that would make them a good fit or hire for the next 12–18 months."

"Most companies are only good at one or two things, which is often enough to be successful. But companies that can tackle more than one thing well tend to outshine everyone else (e.g., Apple with hardware design, supply chain, and marketing)."

When hiring executives: are they implementing exactly what they did in their last role? Or are they first principle thinkers that apply their expertise in the context of your company?

"As an exhausted founder/CEO, the temptation is to try to hire an executive for a role who will last for the remaining history of the company. This leads to over-hiring, or hiring someone who will likely be ineffectual at your current scale."

"Once you hire your first seasoned exec who works out, you will be grateful for her presence. All sorts of things will magically just get done. People will get hired, deals will get closed, process will tighten up."

"You will make mistakes in the hiring process. That's okay – as long as you learn from the mistakes and iterate on your hiring process."

On hiring someone with a discipline not familiar to you: "Go find the five best people that do that role, and just have coffee with them."

"A really good executive is about six to twelve months ahead of the curve. They’re already planning for and acting on things that are going to be important six to twelve months in the future. A decent executive is delivering in real time, now to one to three months in advance."

"The people who are thriving – at any level, junior to senior – tend to have people approaching their desk all the time."

"Somewhere in the 60- to 90-day time period, the new C[O/T/F]O should implement a few things that make everybody go, “Oh wow, this is cool. This is helping."

"Great deal people will take a step back and decide whether to walk away, and they won’t try to force a deal to happen if it shouldn’t. Some of the best “deals” are the ones that don’t happen."

"Raw charisma is drastically overrated by technical founders. Don’t be fooled just because someone is friendly and charming."

"Prioritizing technical debt, for us, is mostly determined by the growth road map, but then sometimes it’s about productivity of people. And sometimes it’s about pure happiness."

"Organizational structure is all about pragmatism: there is no “right” answer. That is, what is the right structure given the talent available to your company, the set of initiatives you need to pursue, and your company’s 12- to 18-month time horizon?"

"Communicate to the team that as your company grows quickly, things will shift around. Make it clear that it is normal for that to happen—it’s a sign of your success—and that other companies that grow fast do the same thing."

"Whatever systems and processes you’re putting in place, you have to be mentally prepared to change them."

"Most great products with strong initial traction fail to endure or become any kind of durable organization."

"Of course the survivors have done well. But while people are attuned to how successful a cradle for technology Silicon Valley is, they pay less attention to, and are I think less aware of, how densely populated a graveyard it is."

"You can have regular brown-bag lunches that are specifically designed to talk about culture and how people feel. You can have monthly, or even quarterly, events where the leaders of the org get together with people to just ask about how they’re feeling."

"When people aren’t scaling, they micromanage in an incredible way. They can also get really tactical, really quickly. It becomes, “Well, I can cross that off my list,” instead of, “I’m going to tackle this big, chunky strategic issue."

"Don’t wait for the week before the launch to let your PR team or agency know what is coming. Just like design, product communications should be part of the product launch timing from early in the process rather than being an afterthought."

"Product management is about product strategy and prioritization."

"Often the biggest ways a product manager can help the team hit goals includes (a) lobbying for resources or attention from engineering, design, and other functions, (b) removing or prioritizing features and providing a clear road map for execution,"

"(c) asking “stupid” questions to see if it is possible for each function to reduce timelines or remove unneeded features or work, and (d) pushing back on extraneous requests, whether those are internal (design, sales, etc.) or external (customers, partners)."

"Optimally, most product management time should be going towards defining the product, prioritizing trade-offs, spending time with customers, and working with various functions on launch, feature iteration, and communication."

"The VP product should be able to lay out a compelling product strategy that includes a strong understanding of (i) who your customers really are, (ii) what it means to win in your market,"

"(iii) how to differentiate as a product and company, and (iv) how to build compelling and remarkable products for your customers."

"Most companies buy too few, rather than too many, companies as they scale."

"The founder just has to keep a very, very tight eye on waste."

"Most companies wait too long before making their first acquisition or are hesitant to use their stock as currency."

"In general, more junior employees or company old-timers tend to push back more on M&A than experienced executives who have seen the value of doing acquisitions well at another company."

Buy and read this book. I could go on and on with more quotes. It's great, and I'll be returning to it for sure.