10
January
2017
|
06:14 AM
America/Los_Angeles

The Advantages Of A Ten-Year Overnight Success

Lots of great observations on the value of ten-year old startups in this post by Irish entrepreneur Cronan McNamaraYour Overnight Success will be 10 Years in the Making + 10 Innovation Tips for the Long Term

He makes a good case that over a ten-year period the founders and management teams have learned a lot and now can leverage that expertise very effectively by using new tools and resources that provide global business opportunities. 



This is why I believe scale up companies, who survive the 10 year horizon, can start to achieve something really special. Gradual progress that doesn’t seem to be too explosive on a day-to-day basis, when compounded over 10 years, can be transformative.


In Silicon Valley those ten-year experts tend to go somewhere else with a new venture but in places like Ireland there is a possibility of keeping teams together and it certainly makes sense that teams that do well together can continue to do well as we see time and again in Silicon Valley serial founders. 

McNamara’s company Creme Global, a successful data science business, is in its 12th year. He shares his top ten tips for success such as:


- Avoid investors if you can — or at least those who are in it for the short term…

- Build a strong team around you so that you can free up some of your time for exploratory work, vision and strategy development and blue-sky thinking…

- The core goal of the funds being generated by the company during scale-up should be to reinvest those funds in R&D until the company finds strong product-market fit with a truly scalable and global opportunity…

- A reproducible, scalable sales process needs to be created.


More here