The hockey stick growth slide is broken (here's a better one)

Without question, the most popular slide in a startup pitch deck is the one showing hockey stick growth.

When you find product/market fit and start seeing rapid customer acquisition, the theory goes, your basic X/Y axis of time and revenue will show exponential jumps. Your monthly revenue goes from $7,000 > $70,000 > $700,000, hence the hockey stick graphic.

Obviously, this is an extremely attractive slide to put in your pitch deck or financials. And while it’s clearly oriented toward venture capital investors, over the last decade hockey stick growth thinking has made its way into private equity and the broader marketplace as others learned from and emulated the growth of Facebook, Google, etc.

The slide does have value, but investors, companies, and founders still frequently mistake the hockey stick as a model for growth, rather than the consequence of it.

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What happens when you frame the work

One of the hardest parts of making the jump to being a manager, leader, or starting a company/org is learning to frame your work. 

This is a brutal truth: most people don’t know how to frame the work they are doing. 

It shows up all the time… 

  • Two people schedule a meeting and spend the first 20 minutes telling a third person about a conversation they already had. 

  • Someone with writing as a core part of their job delivers two projects. One is amazing and on-point, the other is ok but written for the wrong audience. 

  • A partnership opportunity appears out of thin air but the company/org can’t move fast enough to leverage it. 

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The myth of only hiring high performers

One of the things that’s surprised me over the last few years: most people are coachable, but the majority of managers/leaders are looking for people they don’t have to coach. 

This shows up in job descriptions regularly. Sometimes it’s arrogant, like when a founder or executive says “high performers only, we are not here to babysit you.” Other times, it’s more subtle, with a bullet point or two emphasizing the search for someone who is “highly autonomous.”

On the surface, this makes a manager or leader look/feel smart. You’re hiring someone who’s ready to go to work, they are motivated, and they will deliver results without needing much ( or any) support. 

There are a few problems with optimizing this way… 

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The difference between a marketplace and a community

It’s hard to overstate how much power online platforms now have across the globe.

They enable us to easily book a room in São Paulo, scan the news headlines in Nairobi, search for a job in Wellington, and connect us to the people, products, and services around us.

The dominant model for all of this activity is the modern marketplace.

Amazon, Airbnb, Didi Chuxing, Uber, Stripe, WeWork, these are all marketplaces, designed for people to buy and sell products and/or services. The model also extends to social media, where platforms like Facebook have marketplace features and are also viewed as a marketplace for information, ideas exchanged, views shared, beliefs tested etc.

But a marketplace isn’t a community, and as it turns out the difference matters quite a bit.

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Creating a talent pipeline that doesn’t look like the one you already have

For many companies fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion are considered an extra, something you do on top of the business model you already have.

In others, it’s a competitive point, one that opens the door (and tries to keep it open) for talented folks in customer service, engineering, marketing, design, operations, and more. 

In a very small number of companies / organizations, it is a core part of their DNA from the start, doing the work it takes to not only recruit and keep a wide range of talent, but also put ownership, responsibility, and impact into those hands. 

If you’re not in that last group, but you want to be, you may be asking yourself “where can I get 100% amazing talent that is also diverse and inclusive?”

Having worked on it as a hiring manager myself over the years as well as closely observing others, my experience is that there are two ways to do it. Great companies do both. 

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