Suggestions
Nick Cromydas
Investor at Hipcamp
Highlights
I remember my dad telling me that KPMG could be a place where I’d have a safe job forever, and that entrepreneurship would be a risk.
He was right in some ways—KPMG is a great company, and I could have made partner and stayed a long time. But the conventional wisdom of staying in a “big company” because it’s safe is, I think, directionally over.
If you can’t quantify your impact at a company, it’s hard to define your value. And the larger you get, the harder it is to make a visible dent.
We’ve analyzed a few thousand talent patterns of leaders who were directors to CXOs at companies valued at $50-500M, $500M-2B, $2B+, and $100B+, and we had some interesting insights.
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The average leader in the $50-500M range finds their next job more than 60% faster than those in the $2B+ bucket. In some instances, this is 5-7 months faster than someone who primarily works in a $50-500M companies.
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For those in the $2B+ category who moved down to a $50-500M company, great than 50% returned to their previous company size within 3 years.
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Over a 10-year cycle, the amount of time “on the bench” (i.e., not working) was roughly the same between those who spent their career in sub-$500M companies and those in the other two brackets.
We’re going to spend a bit more time looking at the data, cut it at different dates and ranges, etc, but with the world trending toward a larger bifurcation between “mega caps” and everyone else, I'd bet on a place where your impact is clear and measurable...
Such an amazing 36 hours with some great friends in Rick Buhrman, Paul Buser, David Senra, Greg Dugard and 100+ amazing entrepreneurs, investors and more in Scott’s valley talking all things talent & compounding in life, business and investing.
A few of my favorite takeaways:
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High quality projects, with high quality people with a permanent time horizon > be incredibly delibrate with your who, why and focus on greatness over decades not quarters.
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The best entrepreneurs in the world are “Hedgehogs” v “Foxes” > be really good at one thing, and do it over and over again until you perfect it. Then perfect it further. Success will follow.
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“Work hard to get it. Work twice as hard to keep it” > the second success breeds apathy is the second it all starts to go away.
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Creating simplicity is incredibly complex > humans create complexity to create security for themselves. Businesses “Over engineer” solutions. Leaders speak in large quantities of unnecessary jargon. Pursue simple.
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Redwoods spend their first 20 years establishing a foundation & digging deep roots. They grow about 50 ft over their first 20 years. They then grow 50ft or so every year after, for many years to come > Strong foundations create the ability to grow fast. Don’t rush to scale.
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The best leaders in the world bat 70% in getting leadership hires right > People and busineses are imperfect & ever-evolving, and no matter how good you are at pattern matching, developing scorecards and assessing the subjectivity and the variability of people will always impact our ability to hire to perfection. Embrace imperfection.
