Entering Hyper-Growth: 3 Lessons from NYC New Guards
Our New York Enterprise Tech Meetup (NYETM) was back in action this week after a brief summer break. With more than eight years under our belts, we continue to bring together the enterprise tech community (now virtually) of Fortune 500 execs, enterprise startups, and investors in NYC and beyond — including our friends on the West Coast, Canada, Israel, Europe, and more.
Our September NYETM featured enterprise new guards Bill Magnuson, CEO and Co-Founder of Braze, and Dimitri Sirota, CEO and Co-Founder of BigID on a fireside chat about building hyper-growth companies in NYC, moderated by Lucinda Shen, writer at Fortune. Bill and Dimitri dived into the past, present, and future of NYC enterprise tech (hint: it’s still thriving!), and the specific strategies that led their companies to rapid growth.
Additionally, we hosted a demo from Raymond Lau, CEO & Co-Founder of Leapfin, a unified financial data platform. Ray faced a lot of the pain points that Leapfin is addressing during his time leading Business Operations at Zynga. He experienced manual, time consuming, and error-prone processes across data fragmentation, high transaction volution, and hyper-growth. With that, Leapfin’s goal is to fully automate, clean, and validate financial data collection.
If you weren’t able to join us live, check out the full webinar recording here and the top three lessons the new guard CEOs shared with us from their journeys scaling hyper-growth companies:
#1: Your Timing Defines A Lot of Your Early Battles
Bill was 23 when he co-founded Braze in 2011 as the company’s CTO. Looking back on that time, he admits they may have “started too early:”
“When thinking about timing, market opportunity and growth expectations, and as you pile on more venture capital, it’s important to know whether the market is ready for you. Especially if you’re working in fields involving the proliferation of tech or the evolution of customer behavior — which were all challenges in the early days.” — Bill Magnuson, CEO of Braze
At that time, Braze had a lot of conviction in the future of the mobile industry and how that would influence the world. However, entering the market too early meant they had to disrupt the enterprise, while sustaining the mobile business. This uphill battle led them to *almost* run out of runway twice in their first four years. Luckily, once the mobile market caught up with their product, they were already a couple years ahead of their competitors. Now, Braze is investing heavily in accelerating their growth in a disciplined and cash efficient way. While they’re not profitable yet, they operate with no debt, and as of the onset of COVID-19, have yet to spend their $80M Series E raised two years ago. Bill explained they remain cautious of possible, additional risk — no one foresaw COVID-19, and they don’t want to discount another possible pandemic wave, recession dip, etc.
#2: NYC Continues To Be The Go-To Place to Scale An Enterprise Startup
While both Braze and BigID have expanded beyond NYC (they both operate with offices across the world now), both built their companies from the ground up in NYC. This can certainly be attributed to the high concentration of Fortune 500 customers in the area, but both Bill and Dimitri discussed how NYC is a great hiring ground.
Bill explained that during Braze’s current hiring sweep, the company’s geographic distribution remains relatively the same as pre-COVID-19 times, with most of their new talent hired into their NYC headquarters. According to Bill (and many other NYC companies), their culture is built on a foundation of community, collaboration, and organic interaction, and NYC will continue to be the best place to foster that culture once it is safe to open offices post-COVID-19:
“[NYC is] in many ways the cultural capital of the world. When we look at the diversity of talent that’s available in NYC by being a global cosmopolitan city, it’s not a one-industry town. There is an ability to bring people in with interdisciplinary perspective and experiences, and add them to software companies. All of those things are still true in NYC and we’re still bullish on it.” — Bill Magnuson, CEO of Braze
#3: Know Your Indispensable Value & Make It Simple
“We didn’t think too big early on (despite our name). We focused on a problem that we thought existing tech wouldn’t be able to solve and defined a swim lane that was easy for both customers and partners to understand. We invested in that area for a couple of years. That’s the reason we’ve had success raising money.” — Dimitri Sirota, CEO of BigID
Additionally, Dimitri described how BigID offsets competitor risk with a “partner friendly approach,” turning competitors into partners. This helped BigID align with big names and build credibility in the early days. The approach involves empowering partners with BigID’s indispensable value add — their data — while simultaneously using them in a way that powered their own business. For example, BigID is a globally managed partner with Microsoft, is on SAP’s price list, and is working on similar initiatives with AWS, Salesforce, and IBM. This simple, yet effective strategy has been a long-term game changer for the company from early to growth stage success.
If you don’t already, follow our Enterprise Weekly Newsletter every Friday to stay informed on our killer monthly NY Enterprise Tech Meetup speaker lineup and must-follow enterprise startup demos. We hope to see you at the next one!
