Why What Got You to $1M Will Kill You at $10M | Why Enterprise Bets at $20M Win | Why Hiring Big Company Leaders Too Early Is Fatal | The 3 Types of People Every Startup Needs | Russ Thau, Former Revenue Leader at Intercom, Envoy, Box

What got you here won't get you there - the brutal truth about scaling from $1M to $50M in revenue.

If you keep doing what you were doing to get to $1M ARR, you won’t get to $3M ARR. What got you to $3M won’t get you to $10M, what got you to $10M won’t get you to $20M, and so on. The hard truth about rocket ship startup growth is that you have to reinvent yourself at every major revenue milestone you reach. But unfortunately, most founders can't do it. They cling to what worked, scale what's broken, and wonder why growth stalls.

In this episode, I sit down with Russ Thau, a former founder and seasoned revenue leader specializing in scaling companies from $1M to $50M in revenue, to discuss what you have to do when on the Sales side to reach $50M+ in revenue as fast as possible.

Russ has has scaled revenue from single digit millions to $150M+ and two IPOs at companies such as Intercom, Box,  and Envoy, and he's also advised companies like Airtable and LaunchDarkly since they were sub-$1M in revenue.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:
02:02 - Why being a good salesperson is actually bad for getting to $1M revenue
04:31 - The counterintuitive shift from "do everything" to "go extremely narrow" at $1M
07:34 - How to identify role model customers that create herd momentum
11:16 - The dangerous TAM trap: why you DON'T need a billion-dollar market early on
16:48 - When to stop narrowing and start widening your ICP at $3M+
20:33 - The "premature scaling" mistake that kills momentum at $3M
27:54 - Why the bowling pin strategy beats boiling the ocean from $3M to $10M
32:01 - When "good chaos" signals it's time to implement real processes
38:22 - The 5 critical metrics every revenue leader needs at $10M
44:08 - How Box bet the entire company on enterprise at $20M (and won)
50:52 - The 3 types of startup employees - and why nobody spans all three
54:08 - Where to find entrepreneurial salespeople (hint: failed startups)
1:01:08 - When to start "sprinkling in" process-oriented people vs entrepreneurs
1:04:59 - The founder-to-sales-leader handoff: optimal timing and structure
1:11:30 - Why agility beats everything else in startup revenue growth