Software growth and challenges

Challenges of growth

Well, there are many challenges. The first one is to build the momentum, right? So you hired your first few people, you built the vision, and you have to start hiring the talent and hiring the right people who are a good cultural fit for your growth and your speed. Realizing that is a first element.

The second is to enable the processes to actually come in early. Even though you are an early-stage organization, you have to bring the processes in early to enable that growth and limit the chaos. I mean, you tolerate a bit of chaos when you’re a hypergrowth organization, but given who you’re serving and given the scale that you’re trying to establish right away, you have to bring processes very early, which is not a natural thing for a start-up.

I think the first thing is build a culture, bring the processes, and bring the talent in the organization. If you manage those three things correctly, and you stay focused on your core values, you have a good recipe.

The global mind-set

I said from day one that we’re building a small, global company versus building a company in North America and saying, “Oh, we’re going to internationalize the company.” We went global from the get-go. But that gave us the muscle and the ability to support those big customers.

And now, the market is basically switching to calling Anaplan and pulling us into opportunities. So it was absolutely critical for us to grow so fast and take a bit of a leap of faith. You have to believe that your technology will scale and will be relevant for companies around the world.

The last thing I would say on that topic is when you sell to Fortune 1000 organizations, the problems that they face in Singapore are the same problems that they face in France and in the US. I knew that the problem we were addressing was global. The problem of planning and executing your strategy is global. There is no point in waiting.

If you have a good solution for companies in North America, that same solution will apply to the companies in Singapore and in Australia, in France, in Germany, and so on. You want to capture that market, and there is no reason to wait.

Grow fast or die slow?

I think it’s grow fast or die fast. In the world that we’re disrupting, the die slow is not really happening. You have to grow really fast. If you have a solution that fixes a global problem, you have to go global right away. You have no choice, otherwise someone else is going to take that spot.