> "But for all that I'd love to believe that that was because of the wonderful quality of our product, it realistically wasn't. It was ads."
> Why were we able to buy those ads? Because investors gave us a lot of money.
> And why do investors give companies a lot of money? On the expectation that they will pursue aggressive growth, not stop at small to middling scale.
This exactly describes the same lessons I learned working at Udacity around 2016-2018. We built–and then walked away from–a handful of moderately successful businesses that probably could've been run almost indefinitely at little marginal cost. Instead when we crossed 50k enrollments we pivoted–because 50k enrollments doesn't justify unicorn status.
(I don't think that was wrong; it's just that that's what the investors wanted.)
I wonder if there should be a less-speculative investment arm whose entire model is "pick up the nonscalable businesses venture firms find and can't commit to". Sounds really interesting, actually! You need the speculation to find the niche, but then you need the not-speculative approach to exploit it.
That’s an interesting idea! There’s already a lot of companies that are founded out of the graveyard of startups that failed to scale. (Sound familiar?) ;-)
I think the conventional wisdom would say that it’s not worth the effort to put together those smaller companies though; those resources would be better spent finding a different business that could scale. It would probably depend on whether there are any efficiencies of operating many such businesses.
Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…), and it didn’t have an ML track until long after it was relevant for me.
I can't see why it wouldn't be worth the effort to assemble a suite of companies with millions in ARR. It might not be funding-AirBnB-level profitable, but there's plenty of money in it, and your hit rate would be far higher.
Structure it as something akin to an accelerator, pitch it as the way to run a company with less risk and less of the wild existential uncertainty of being a traditional founder, take a big chunk of equity to compensate for the idea being prefab and maybe give a payout to the pivoting company as a pseudo-fire-sale acquisition (which also funds their pivot), take on some employees who liked the pre-pivot thing and set them up with your Very Talented Founders(TM), and go to town.
This should exist. The more I think about it the more I think it's an excellent idea.
> Aside: good luck with Otherbranch. TripleByte was a critical part of my own career journey in 2018/2019, so I’m keen to see how it goes this time around. My complaints about TB were basically that it was too focused on SF Bay Area (I get it…)
Thanks! Hopefully the Bay Area thing might be less of an issue for us, because (a) we're recruiting specifically for individual roles (so we're not burning a bunch of cash if we get a good candidate where we can't place them yet) and (b) tech has definitely dispersed from the Bay over the last few years, even if not completely. I'd love to work with some of the Sun Belt startup scene.
> Why were we able to buy those ads? Because investors gave us a lot of money.
> And why do investors give companies a lot of money? On the expectation that they will pursue aggressive growth, not stop at small to middling scale.
This exactly describes the same lessons I learned working at Udacity around 2016-2018. We built–and then walked away from–a handful of moderately successful businesses that probably could've been run almost indefinitely at little marginal cost. Instead when we crossed 50k enrollments we pivoted–because 50k enrollments doesn't justify unicorn status.
(I don't think that was wrong; it's just that that's what the investors wanted.)