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Growing Pains
Be fanatic about the culture you want to see in your company, and be even more fanatic in maintaining that culture.
Can a company grow too fast?
The answer to that question is yes, but many will struggle to provide me with that answer because they’ve never experienced it.
Only those who’ve gone through a period of excessive growth and had to deal with the consequences will answer the question with a yes.
The late Tony Hsieh, early investor and later CEO of Zappos, is one of those entrepreneurs who would answer the question with yes.
And I’m not referring to Zappos here. I’m referring to the first company he founded with two others, called LinkExchange.
LinkExchange made Tony rich, but that’s not the story here.
The story is that Tony sold LinkExchange to Microsoft because he didn’t recognize his own company anymore.
In his book about Zappos, which also addresses the years before Zappos, he describes how LinkExchange had gotten away from him.
As the company grew quickly, he soon didn’t recognize many of his employees anymore.
But he did notice that those employees lacked the initial employees’ commitment and…
