Is Growth Bad for Startups?

I'd like to start with a story. About a year ago, I met a company called PowerDrive, which sells a CRM solution to the auto mechanic space. The founder, Marco, has actually become a friend of mine. The company was $3 million a year in recurring revenue, US, had 90% customer retention, Uh, it had just raised $3 million at a $12 million valuation from a venture capital firm, and it had just secured a $2 million secured credit facility, uh, from a commercial bank that the venture capital firm had introduced PowerDrive to. Uh, we just agreed to stay in touch, PowerDrive, Marco, the founder, and I. So fast forward 6 months, I reconnected with Marco, and he said things weren't going well. The VC firm said it's time to take it to the next level or kick the growth. So he had expanded into 3 adjacent markets, tire change shops, oil change shops, and paint and body shops. But those customers had different use cases and they had poorer financial profiles, which meant that his sales cycles were longer, his conversion rates were lower, and customer churn was higher. So at that time, he had $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue. He was posting 80% customer retention, but he had $1.5 million of incremental cash burn from all of the sales and marketing investments, but he had lost his second largest customer who felt neglected because of the focus on growth. All right, fast forward again to present day, and Marco and I connected via video conference about 2 weeks ago. And he said that the commercial bank which had lent him that $2 million was threatening to foreclose because he had been in covenant default for 90 days. He said it was ironic that at the very moment he decided to grow, he was growing broke. Marco's gonna lose his company. That's just an anecdote, but it illustrates a broader point, which is there's a fine line between growing growing recklessly and growing expeditiously. And the first thing I'd like to share with you tonight is that we at Think3 think that there is an incentives misalignment fundamentally between most VCs and founders, and that that incentives misalignment is pushing companies to grow too much, too fast, and it's ruining great companies like PowerDrive. Fundamentally, a founder has the incentive maximize the value of her company. A VC has the incentive to maximize the value of her portfolio, and those two things aren't the same thing. To understand why, take a look at this illustration for me. This is one portfolio company whose future value is represented by a span of potential outcomes. At t 0, it's worth 1 times invested capital. On the left, in a future states of the world, it could be worth zero, or it could be worth as much as 6 times invested capital, or it could be worth something in between. Same portfolio company to which a VC might apply the maximum amount of growth pressure. Growth is another word for introducing volatility, widening the fan of outcomes for that company. So look at the shaded region. You still can't lose any more than what you put in. You can't lose any more than 100%, but look at the expanded shaded region up top, right? There is an increased chance that it could return 10, 11, 12 times invested capital. So show of hands, if you're a founder, which would you rather choose in most cases? Left? Right? Okay, if you're a VC, which would you rather choose? Left, right. Exactly. There, there's a misalignment of incentives because VCs are really smart. They understand that their portfolio returns don't follow a normal distribution. They don't follow a bell curve. They follow a power distribution where literally one or two companies drives the entirety of the returns. 20 to 30% plot along and return between 1 and 2x. And two-thirds actually lose money. So, if you're a VC, you have the incentive, no matter where you think the company might initially fall on this rank, forced ranking of multiples of invested capital, you have an incentive to try to force every company to be a unicorn, to try to shoot for the stars. Because as a founder, you might not make that choice, because there's actually an increased chance of total loss on the right-hand side. But as a VC, you'll make that choice all day long because even if it wrecks every company but one, that's okay because one is all you need. Okay, quick show of hands. Who thinks we're in a bubble right now? All right, that's good. So we agree on that. And raise your hand if you didn't just raise your hand because I put you to sleep. Yeah, all right. So I think we should— I'm going to go ahead and skip through these next few slides, but I hope because there are pretty graphs on them, you'll believe that I did my homework. I want to pause here for a moment. That misalignment of incentives I just highlighted has always existed. The reason it's a bigger deal now is because of the bubble we're in. The proliferation of venture capital firms over the last 5, 10, 15 years and of fundraising by those venture capital firms has created an environment where only moonshots will do for venture capital firms. It's created almost a —pyramidal game of musical chairs where you need the companies to outgrow their overcapitalization in order to justify their valuation, to pass them on to someone higher up the food chain who's just going to do the same thing. The, the misalignment of incentives is worse and is having a greater impact because of how large the industry is And because it's self-reinforcing, not self-correcting. Because ironically, if and as things start to turn sour, VCs actually have to push harder to make up the losses. Okay, uh, I see someone shrugging over there, so thank you for helping me make my transition. All this has been very theoretical to date, even if it's maybe been interesting. Um, so So how does this manifest itself? What are actually the risks of overgrowth? At Think Three, we keep a database of 60,000 B2B technology companies globally. We speak with 1,500 of them every quarter. Uh, we keep detailed notes on their metrics, their progress, and their challenges. And from that primary research, We've come up with this list of 6 mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive reasons why we think overgrowth can be bad. I see a handful of people taking pictures with their phone. That's good. You can refer to it later. In the interest of time, I'm actually not going to walk through each one, but I will highlight a few things. In numbers 1 and 2, when we say debt, we mean the increased cost tomorrow of shortcuts today. It can be in your product or it can be in your organization. Number 3, uh, I'd like to share that we consistently find at ESW Capital and Think Three, founders retrospectively regret making the trade-off between retention and growth, even though the simple math is If you shoot for an extra percent of growth, it'll make up for an extra percent of churn. Because of those fans of outcomes we looked at, because of the distribution of returns, most companies aren't necessarily in situations where they can grow that quickly. So we find they're usually better off actually focusing on retention, not on growth. But they can't make that trade-off because they feel a lot of pressure from their venture capital investors, or they feel too much pride to make that trade-off. But because it's a regret that's so often shared with us, I thought it was worth highlighting. Numbers 4 and 5 are, uh, self-explanatory. But number 6, I want to take a moment on because my college roommate, uh, is a principal at Bain Capital Ventures. And it's ironic that when friends of his ask him for fundraising advice, he actually dissuades them from talking to Bain Capital Ventures. He says that the bar is too high and they don't want to play that game. He says that a $100 million exit is a bad outcome, that something went wrong. And I'm like, "What?" Like, I know what you're talking about, but There is something wrong in that scenario because a $100 million exit, a $50 million exit, a $5 million exit can be life-changing. It should be a raging success. But what my college roommate is referring to is each time you raise VC funding, each time you bring more investors into your cap table, each time you have to introduce greater and greater growth projections, in order to justify that valuation and get to the next step, you take more and more options off the table. And pretty soon, only a rocket ship to the moon will do, and your VCs won't let you take some of the exit opportunities that might otherwise look pretty attractive, 'cause they've got too much skin in the game. And again, think back to the distribution of returns. They need you to go for 15x, not 1, 2, 3, or 4x. That doesn't drive their fund returns. And there's nothing pernicious about this approach by VCs. I'm not, I'm not even critiquing it. I'm just trying to share that that's how the model works. So we should be aware of it. Those of us who are founders and running our companies. All right. So those are the 6 risks to overgrowth as we see them. Um, so to take stock real quick, We've tried to talk about the fact that we at Think3 believe there is a misalignment of incentives between venture capitalists and their portfolio companies that leads to over-focusing on growth, and we've talked about the fact that the bubble is actually exacerbating that impact, and now we've talked about why we think it's dangerous. So what do you do with all that good news, right? I'm just a a barrel of laughs today. Should I point this somewhere? Would you mind taking me to the next slide if you could? Notwithstanding, I'm going to walk through a framework that will help us think about what we should do, because A talk is not very helpful that just identifies a problem and then tries to explain it. What should you do about it? So this is the takeaway, so if you're asleep, wake up. There are basically 3 states of the world we at Think3C for entrepreneurs. You should do some soul searching, and it's— no one ever has the time to, but ask yourself whether you really whether you wanna have a lifestyle business or whether you wanna play in the big leagues, so to speak. And there's nothing pejorative about a lifestyle business. We just mean a business where you can have a life. We mean a business where a $10 million exit would be good, where you can keep more equity, where you wouldn't be forced to grow as quickly. Most of the founders we talk to actually want to choose the lifestyle option. But they're almost sort of embarrassed by it, given the market we're in. So they feel like they have to sprinkle a little bit of big leagues into it, and that just makes their lives more complicated. So, um, some actionable advice is don't necessarily go for the tier 1 VCs or the big names, especially if you think you might be in camp 3, because the prestige really does come with strings. But you're all at the Saastr conference, which probably means you're not necessarily building a lifestyle business. So let's talk about If you choose, no, I want to play the game at the highest possible level, I want to play in the big leagues, then to oversimplify, there's one of two possible outcomes. Either it's the first state of the world and it works, like it clicks, product market fit, everything, even if only briefly. And if you actually find that perfect scenario, just put the gas pedal to the floor and dance until the music stops. Raise from the tier 1 VCs, just hang on. It's gonna be painful, but hang on. The reason I put 0.02% on that line in the decision tree though, is there was some now famous research done by Cowboy Ventures into outstanding VC-backed startups. And they found that 0.02% of VC-backed startups become unicorns. And our own research suggests that only about 10% are ever on escape velocity trajectory or above the Mendoza line, so to speak, even if only for a, a brief time. And that implies that most founders should actually probably be choosing the lifestyle option. But where's the fun in that? So what should you do if you're in the second state of the world? 'Cause that's the likelier outcome, right? You don't want a lifestyle business, you wanna play in the big leagues, but it is so rare that that actually pans out. Our unusual advice, and hear me out, is sell more quickly. Give up. What we mean by that is founders should more often be selling their companies more quickly and moving on to start more companies because they get a lot better every time they do it. Interesting corollary from the same Cowboy Ventures research that 90% of unicorn teams had worked together previously and the average age of a founder was 34. It means it takes multiple shots to get it right. It's not someone in their college dorm room. It's not someone at the beginning of their career. We also found— not we, Cowboy Ventures also found, and I'm plagiarizing their stuff— that once they were in the unicorn venture, 90% of those startups never pivoted, and 100% of those startups were always above the Mendoza line, the escape velocity trajectory. And the hard lesson from that piece of the research is the second you think you're not headed to the first state of the world, you need to get out. Because statistically speaking, there's not gonna be a third pivot or a second bridge financing or, you know, a growth inflection that's just around the corner. Statistically speaking, it doesn't happen. There's only one Slack. What that means, again, and this is the real takeaway from the talk, we at Think3 think that most founders tragically underestimate the value of their time as being their portfolio. Just like venture capitalists can think of their capital as their portfolio. They get many portfolio companies, but most founders think that, well, this is my one shot, this is my baby. And our advice is that it's actually important to try to force yourself to be more rational than that, to give up more quickly the second you think you're not on escape velocity trajectory? Because you can try again, and you'll get a lot better every time you do. And that's why we founded Think3, because we have an operating model and a permanent capital solution for those who want to do right by their customers, or their investors, or their employees, and whose companies deserve success. Sustainability and to be made profitable and to have a legacy, but it's just not possible to build methodically a pretty steady eddy company with venture financing in today's environment because everyone is shooting for the moon and there's no points for second place. Okay, I've been talking for, uh, like 15 minutes, so, uh, it's time to wrap this up. Uh, there are 3 takeaways. Number 1, we think most founders don't understand that there is a misalignment of incentives implicitly between them and their venture capitalists, and that that misalignment results in an overfocus on growth. Number 2, we think that most founders don't realize that the overfocus on growth is actually dangerous for their companies. And number 3, we think that most founders can actually use the overfocus on growth to their advantage, like a judo artist, either by more often choosing the lifestyle option or by having a more sober approach to their relationship with their companies and with VCs, by actually selling companies more often, more quickly, to take their learnings and try again and again. And ultimately, even though they're selling individual companies for lower valuations, they amass greater wealth for themselves and create more value for society as a whole if they follow that path. And that's really the crux of why we think growth is sometimes bad for startups, but what we think the opportunity is from it. Because Marco of PowerDrive learned this lesson the hard way. When he and I were talking, you know, the 2 weeks ago and he was sharing that he thought that the bank was gonna foreclose, he sort of said like, "What do I do?" And I shared with him a story of, 'cause he's a car guy and I'm a car guy, of a mid-20th century Italian engineer named Enzo. Who in 1957's Mille Miglia race debuted the fastest, biggest car he'd ever built, because he was in growth mode, and it was called the 335S. It was a monster V12. It went 200 miles an hour, 300 kilometers an hour in 1957. It was a beast. During the race, it busted a tire. It careened off the road into a roadside crowd. It killed both drivers and 9 spectators. Anyway, he was like, "Thanks, Alex. So like your takeaway is, okay, too little growth, you die. Just the right amount of growth, you thrive. And too much growth, you die?" I told him, "Sort of." I told him my point was the engineer's name was Enzo Ferrari. I told him my point was he should have sold his company a year ago. But if he still had the ambition, he should give up now and go start another one. I told him my point was that growth, like speed, is inherently dangerous, but he should keep racing, he should keep building, just like Enzo Ferrari. That is the unusual, but I think necessary, message that we wanted to share with you this afternoon. Thank you for listening.