Table of Contents
Introduction
I had coded my first startup project on the ten-hour flight Frankfurt — Johannesburg back in 2004 while working for Microsoft as a Global Alliances Manager. It had become quite popular, hadn’t made me a dime, and died miserably once Yandex, a Russian Google competitor, launched a competing product.
Since then, in various executive roles, I helped build Veeam Software from pretty much zero to over $600 million in annual revenue in under eight years, which resulted in the company being acquired by Insight Venture Partners for $5 billion. By 2017, Veeam had become too big for my taste. I made an exit and invested in about twenty startups as an angel investor. Among them were a space satellite manufacturer, a burger chain with a franchising program, a game studio, a fashion retail stores automation company, and many of my favorite AI and deep tech startups. I have helped them and many others, which I’ve advised without being an investor, to scale globally.
I have learned a lot about what it means to build a great company from scratch throughout this journey. There are no silver bullets, mind you, no simple recipes. It is all about this unique combination of passion and the desire to change the world with an efficient end-to-end revenue generation process, dull day-to-day operations, regularly tested, and improved. As Andrei Baronov, Veeam co-founder and “Steve Jobs of infrastructure software,” used to say — “You know what they say in Silicon Valley, that the best product doesn’t always win? Well, guess what — the best product never wins without the best sales, marketing, and operations!”
I tried to capture and describe this balance in this book through stories, cases, anecdotes, and a pretty detailed operating manual on setting up your company and business processes from the practical point of view.
I won’t be talking much, or at all, about the product. There are countless good books and resources that focus on how to design and build a great product. However, the same cannot be said about a detailed discussion of a growing company’s operations and business processes.
Hence, I focus more on the principles on which a truly great company is built and the principles of the organization of the company’s operations. These principles should age well, as they are based on basic human psychology and behaviors and the best practices of experimental testing of the processes you want to implement in your company. The tools may, and will, change, but if you learn these principles and practice them, you will have no issue applying what you have learned in the new circumstances.
I hope you will find this book useful on your journey towards turning your passion into a great company!
How this book is structured
TBD: description of the book structure and some comments on each chapter. E.g., make a mention that the concepts in this book are quite timeless, tools may change, but the concepts remain.
Part 1: Strategy
Chapter 1: A Great Company Architecture
Chapter 2: Five Stages of a Zero to a 100M Journey
Chapter 3: Goals and Strategy – Level 0
Chapter 4: Go-to-markets and “Marketecture” – Level 1
Part 2: Operations – End-to-End Revenue Generation Process
Chapter 5: How do people buy?
Chapter 6: End-to-End revenue generation process – The Framework
Chapter 7: Marketing
Customer Journey
Customer is always in the center, map their journey first. Maturity Frameworks.
Attract Stage
TBD
Engage Stage
TBD
Convert Stage
TBD
Expand Stage
TBD
Organization
TBD. Interaction and conflicts with the sales org. Where should my SDRs be?