Employees, your bootstrapped scaleup needs agitators
How to help your founder get to $100M
You work for a pay-check?
Look around — your team is made up of employees and owners (agitators).
“owner” referred to from here, not in the sense of “financial owner”, but a work-ethic like an owner.
The ecosystem:
• Large groups need more employees.
• Small groups need owners.
Those to serve the direction, and those to serve and examine it.
• Small groups in large groups need owners …think the exec team.
In any work setting, you won’t avoid hiring both (unless you hire intentionally)
Typically, owners like to experiment, while employees fear change.
Owners operate like founders, but are without the capital (for better or worse!). Ideally they are invested through ESOP.
Change and scale are hand-in-hand - because scale is not infinite, so you’ll continue to run in to change problems.
Are you an owner or an employee?
In a science analogy: heated matter moves between solid → liquid → gas.
Phase change requires agitating - energy, momentum, persistence.
Intrinsically in this process, particles collide to push and expand to something new — a great visualisation of change.
However, not everyone likes change.. so to defend “fear of change”, the owner-archetype needs to be a good judge of fit and timing.
A thinking tool that has made this less seismic, has been “small bets”. Allowing owners to explore ideas in less noisy ways: agitating slowly, trying new things, seeing what sticks. Constructive change agency is not simply disrupt for disruption’s sake.
How can you enable change-makers?
As places that constantly need to experiment to find fit …without agitation… how else can a scaleup push to $100M???
I found it most bizarre recently to learn of a redundancy blitz at a scaleup that let go of their entire Growth team — a natural habitat of owners.
Looking around - the founder was a bootstrapped founder.
❓ Are bootstrapped founders less likely to promote owner-mindset - for fear of making themselves redundant.
❓ How will that scaleup make it to $100M?
Existential risk and accountability risk can be channelled as agitators. Sometimes the dark art of bringing on a VC can be useful in this regard.
Since it's easier to scale things that already work than find traction on new ideas - the challenge of starting-up - scaleups need owners in spades.
A lever to acceleration (to change) is owner-mindset.
Simple Radical Idea:
To bring about change, you need agitators.
Please go out and embrace difference, permit yourself to gamble with people who’s views you don’t immediately agree with. Hire constructive mindsets that agitate yours and make space for them. Give it time.
Reward the owner-mindset …but don’t shout loudly about it, because you need the employees to drive it home.