Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
This is a way to be. It's an alternative to what you're often hearing in our industry, which is, 'Go big or go home. Raise a bunch of money and get huge, and unicorn status,' and the whole thing. That's a way. Just know though that basically almost nobody makes it that way.
Small is not just a stepping stone, small is a great destination itself.
If you are going to be that large company, you need to get to a billion in revenue per year. It doesn't have to be overnight, it can be over 20 years, it's not something that has to happen quickly, but that's how I think about it.
Why don't you actually just create its own C corp? Why don't you make it so clear that this is its own entity?
Bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want to cash flow. Funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue.
We wanted a company where a thousand people could work, but it'll look like 10 people did it.
We probably, if we had taken money, we could have had a billion-dollar exit or we could have kept going. And we should have taken money earlier in our life cycle. This was actually a big mistake because we got hooked on the efficiency and that was great, but we could have moved even quicker than we were.