Michelle Zatlyn on early-stage startups: solve real problems, hire strong technical talent, and use crises to realign your team. The intense ups and downs of small companies happen less often as you scale.
Solve a real problem, a meaningful problem.
And assemble a team that can execute against it.
And like, just early on, just obsessing along those two things, I think those.
Are the ones that really separate the.
Early stage startups with the ones who.
Kind of end up getting to the next phase and real traction. Today we have 530 people, so we're at a little bit different stage. But I just remember early on, like the highs and lows were very close together. And so like in a given day you'd have a high and.
And you're like, this is the greatest moment ever.
And then 20 minutes later something really bad would happen. And I just. The highs and lows, any given day, it's emotionally draining.
And so that's very normal. I think what gets better over time is you still have the highs and.
The lows, but they're much more spread out.
And so it's not every day.
I'm not coming with a big high and a low. It's maybe weekly or monthly. And so it's just much more manageable.
And sustainable both for you personally and your team.
Because.
Because thing is, you're having highs and lows early and if you have less than 40 people, your whole team is.
Also having highs and lows regularly.
And again, that's great early, but it's.
Not sustainable for 8, 9, 10 years.
I say the best part of my.
Job are the people I get to work with.
I remember early on people would always.
Talk about team and culture and I.
Kind of rolled my eyes a little bit and I was totally wrong and.
They were totally right. It is the most important thing you do.
And like at Cloudflare, I work with some folks who have really deep technical expertise. We build infrastructure for the Internet.
We're a very technical company.
And I work with folks who are.
Like crypto experts or really deep in.
Certain fields and I will never be.
As good as them at that. But the fact that we're on the same team and I get to hear.
From them and learn from them and that I have different skill sets, that we all come together working towards this common goal. Again, it's the best part of my.
Job, the people I get to work with.
The second best part of my job are our customers. But I say it all the time.
People I work with, the best part of my job.
What I like to.
Say is you can't let a crisis go to waste. And I think that that is hard.
To remember sometimes when those crises.
But never let a good crisis go to waste. Use it to your advantage. Use it to bring the team together.
Change course, change something in the organization. Because organizations are way more resilient than.
Than you think.
SF Conference 2013 CASE STUDY: Michelle Zatlyn - Scaling a Company To A Billion Views A Day
