By Karthik Sridharan W’07/ENG’07, Co-Founder & CEO of Kinnek
This is a message for all you CEOs of early-stage companies.
Phase 1: High Touch
As your company goes through various phases of its lifecycle, the CEO role must also undergo some pretty dramatic changes. In the formative days of your company, it’s all hands on deck. It doesn’t matter if you’re CEO or intern, you’re getting your hands dirty with the nitty gritty. That’s unavoidable.
Read more Hey CEO, That’s Not Your Job Anymore
By Geoffrey Garrett, Dean of the Wharton School
Wherever I go in the world, everyone is desperately seeking innovation and they’re looking to Silicon Valley for inspiration. This is true for places as different as Tokyo and Dubai, Amsterdam and Mumbai, Beijing and Singapore.
Read more Scale Matters: How to Make Startups Sustainable
By Nadine Kavanaugh, Associate Director, Wharton Entrepreneurship
At our recent Alumni Dinner in Philadelphia, Rich Riley W’96, CEO of Shazam and Lucnida Duncalfe C’85/WG’91, CEO of Monetate, sat down and opened up about what it’s really like to scale a company. If you were in the room, you got to hear what Rich Riley thinks Marissa Mayer should do with Yahoo… But even if you couldn’t be there, here are some fascinating insights from these two tremendous entrepreneurs:
By Todd Gibby WG’97, CEO of BoardEffect
Growth is awesome. This is true in any business setting, but particularly so in an early-stage environment. For entrepreneurs, growth is a wonder drug that cures most visible ailments, and countless hidden ones. But, like anything, too much growth (too aggressive, overextending operations) can also create problems for our evolving organizations. As a result, we focus a lot on how to manage growth – how to tame the same wild beast that we strive tirelessly to unleash. We obsess about how to prepare our organizations to perform successfully as they grow – in short, how to “scale” a business. Conversations about scale tend to focus on systems, processes, people, and business models…each of which is important. But, in my experience, one thing rises above them all as far as criticality in scaling: mindset.
