Name: Why It’s Dangerous for Startups to Grow Too Fast
Uploaded: 2016-11-17
Duration: 4 min 44 s
Description: According to ViSalus CEO Ryan Blair

[ SOUND ] One, two, three, four, five. And from you. One, two, three, four, five. One more time. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. [ LAUGH ] [ CROSSTALK ] So, a lot of people that are say, in the middle class, have a lot to loose. They're worried about their mortgages, or their Their car payment or their children's education. I didn't have to worry about any of that stuff, so I took a lot of risk. Now I help people start business through my fund. So I think I just had the ability to take risks. You now evaluate so many entrepreneurs yourself, so what do you look for? I mean, in addition to the business idea, do you look for certain Attracted to the personality? Do you look for someone whose in it for the right reason? What are the things you look for ?>> Passion. Hunger. Ambition. Intellegence, obviously. A person who really spends a lot of time trying to perfect something and they just need the business academic preps and things that I've learned. I look for people that are Really experts in a particular area, and they have such a passion for it, they're obsessed with it. And then I help them do all the other things that are very difficult, like raising money and so forth. You also write in your book about the decision you made to leave college. Yeah. Tell me about that a little bit. You say you still have nightmares about that decision. Yeah it sucks. You know, being a continuation high school student, which is an alternative school, dropping out in the ninth grade, never passed the math test, was never able to have any English proficiency. It's got a pipeline and he said, you'll come back and you'll keynote the graduating class some day. So, I don't advise people to leave their college unless they actually have a real, real running business. At that time, I was a software engineer. I started my company when I was maintaining a full course load. And so I had to choose something, and I chose to start my company. So what's next, what's the next five years hold for you? In the next five years, I'll make enough of an impact that I'll be able to spend Hopefully the rest of my life, giving away my money, with the same intentionality that I did in making it. I've committed 95 % of my wealth to charity because I really believe our society has given me all these resources. Like, I'm the luckiest man in the world. To be in America at this time, at this place, with this type of disruption occurring. And I have a son, seven years old, and I think that I want to teach him how to earn money. I was reading the book the Monk who sold his Ferrari. And I had a Ferrari and my son got attached to that Ferrari and so I sold the Ferrari because I wanted my son to understand that materialism, you know, is not the right route. You have to learn how to earn it, right? What are the challenges with your business right now? Creating culture is the most difficult thing You know, I'm a, I tend to be more of the strategic thinker so I like to spend more time alone and obviously as a leader you've gotta be out there and you gotta talk to people, and you've gotta meet people and spend time with them. So I'm learning that and I'm trying to use algorithms to help me get there. For example, I monitor my communication frequency to the various individuals and make sure that I'm adding You know more people in depth and asking the right questions of those individuals. Hiring people that put you in the strike zone and augment your weaknesses. So, I'm trying to do it analytically because I made a mistake, I hired 500 people in a year. I think I went from 80 employees to about 500 and my culture got away from me and my structure got away from me. Next thing you know, I showed up to an office that I hated. I didn't want to come to work anymore, in the very company I owned. What advice would you give to someone who's in that situation now, a CEO what do you do? Tony Shay told me this, he said slow down your growth at all costs. Because growth covers mud, but as a startup entrepreneur all you want is growth, when we got to 65 million a month in sales I would hit refresh on my mobile app and would see a thousand dollars a minute come in. Right? Like that's the dream. That became the nightmare, when you're growing that fast, you start to think you walk on water, and next you know I'm buying a Challenger 300 jet, it's not a wise use of money. So you slow down the growth, and do you kind of discipline yourself in terms of, what to do with your resources? Yeah, you, it's really easy to hire people to spend your money. So when you make 120 million, every executive in the world wants to come and get that job and then hire 20 people, and hire 20 people, and hire 20 people. Right now I'm using a much more disciplined process in my start- ups, much more measured. And I have an anti- waste policy on the inside of the walls. So if I wanna have a private plane ride, which I do on occasion, The company, not inside the company. Because the company should be spending all of its resources on developing and adding value to its customers, and to its employees, every penny of it. Not on the [ UNKNOWN ]. Mm- hmm. [ MUSIC ]