Today's big tech companies weren't always titans, though it's difficult to imagine a world without them now and it's equally difficult to compete with them. So what should startup founders do?
"Don't worry about any of the big tech companies. They're no smarter than you, they're no faster than you, you can be much more agile," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said on Friday during a conversation with Pegasus Tech Ventures investment manager Michael Farace during the Startup World Cup in San Francisco.
Microsoft acquired the San Francisco-based coding platform in 2018 for $7.5 billion in an all-stock deal that came just a few years after GitHub raised $250 million in a Series B round that valued the company at $2 billion.
Not too shabby.
There's a certain inertia that begins to develop as a company grows larger, though, making startups much more nimble despite their relatively minuscule market reach when compared to the Microsofts of the world.
Here are five things Dohmke had to say during the Startup World Cup about startups and leading a company:
Be focused on your customers.
“Study your customers early and often. The most energy you get is out of customer meetings, even if those customers aren't happy, or they're telling you that things are not going well, it's so easy as the CEO or the C-suite of a startup to say, I'm sorry, you know, we made a mistake, we can do better, you just need to get over yourself. But at the end of the day, that's easy to say, the customer will understand you. You can explain to them why things have happened in the positive or negative way.”
Startups are more agile than bigger companies.
“Big companies believe they can do it all, but they really can't, either. There's always a limit. The backups will always be too long. There will always be too much tech debt, and operational overhead with the company is just so much bigger than in startups. … Don't worry about any of the big tech companies, they're no smarter than you, they're no faster than you, you can be much more agile. You as CEOs can push to achieve and generate energy to ship something within a week that takes a month, if not three months, at a big company.”
How to thrive post-acquisition?
“We try to retain that same culture within GitHub even though we're now owned by Microsoft. It's kind of like, I like to see that as the best of both worlds. I don't have to go to earnings calls and tell the street if my numbers are disappointing. At the same time, we're a public company, so all my employees are able to sell their stock when they need to generate some cash and we benefit, obviously, from the Microsoft machine. Especially when it comes to sales. … It's a good healthy relationship, I'd say, but we are independent in terms of operating.”
The biggest difference between being an employee and a CEO?
“I'm a CEO of a company that I hadn't founded but I still feel like this is my company. I think the biggest difference between that and being employed at the company is how you feel on Sunday night. A normal employee on Sunday night, they are basically looking back at the weekend and they're kind of dreading Monday morning. … As a CEO, as a founder of a startup, as a member of the startup, Sundays don't feel like that. They feel like, ‘Oh, tomorrow is the day that I can keep working on the thing.’”
Start your day with the most exciting stuff.
“Think about what gives you energy and what drains energy. And you don't want to do a boring finance meeting at 8 in the morning, because that's usually the best time of the day after the first cup of coffee. I want to create something or I want to speak with a customer. I want to be excited because that gives me excitement for the rest of the day. You know, the best days are where I have so many customer meetings that by 3 p.m. I realized I had no food, I had no coffee.”
Rehearse everything.
“Rehearse everything in your life. The Rolling Stones, after 50 years as a successful band, still rehearse in front of every single concert. And you would think Mick Jagger doesn't need this, right? But he does, because he knows that when he rehearses, he gets better at doing that. And that's true for your pitches. It's true for your one-on-ones. It's true for your customer conversations. … By doing it over and over again and not worrying too much about failing but thinking about how much you get better every time you're doing it, you're becoming a better CEO, becoming a better founder and, ultimately, a better human.”
