Building a Resilient Tech Startup

The New York Times profiled a start-up with 28 employees serving nearly 50 million users. That company is us. The traditional startup playbook: raise massive funding, hire hundreds of employees, and worry about profitability "later." But there's another way. Everyone at Gamma could fit in a small restaurant. We're not just surviving—we've been profitable for 15+ consecutive months, with revenue growing month over month, and lifetime negative net burn (we have more money in the bank than we've raised). This isn't an accident. We've deliberately designed our organization to maximize impact per person. Instead of creating specialist silos, we hire versatile generalists who can solve problems across domains. Rather than building management hierarchies, we find player-coaches who both lead and execute. Our team leverages AI tools throughout our workflow - Claude for data analysis, Cursor for coding efficiency, NotebookLM for customer research synthesis. These aren't just productivity hacks; they're force multipliers. Examples: — When our growth PM needed better analytics, he didn't file a ticket with a data team—he built a self-serve system that anyone can use without SQL knowledge. — When our marketing lead needed to understand our customers better, she fed thousands of interactions into an LLM and created actionable personas that now guide our entire strategy. — When our design team needs to test a hypothesis, we create a rapid prototype and show it to our power users. What we're seeing isn't just about "doing more with less." It's about fundamentally changing what's possible per person. The most valuable employees aren't specialists who excel in narrow domains - they're resourceful problem-solvers who continuously expand their capabilities. This approach creates remarkable resilience. Since everyone understands multiple functions, we don't have single points of failure when someone leaves or moves to another project. If you're building today, the question isn't how quickly you can scale headcount … it's how much impact you can create with the smallest possible team. The future belongs to tiny teams of extraordinary people.

I had a chance to reflect on a recent incident and wanted to write a founder note on Building Resilient Growth. In the world of inflated growth expectation, a successful enterprise startup requires balancing ambitious vision with disciplined execution. Here are key principles to keep in mind: Avoid Debt-Fueled Growth: Debt creates fixed obligations that don’t flex with market realities. Enterprise sales cycles are unpredictable, and debt payments don’t pause for delayed deals or pivot opportunities. Stick to equity funding that aligns with your actual progress and gives you breathing room to adapt. Under-Promise, Over-Deliver: It’s tempting to anchor investors (and future investors who are looking at your current round) and customers on aggressive projections, but missed expectations erode trust faster than conservative wins build it. Set realistic milestones and exceed them consistently. Direct Sales Before Channel Sales: Partners need education and enablement. Build your direct sales muscle first to understand your customer deeply, then use that knowledge to train and support channel partners effectively. Build Independent Market Relevance: When transformative trends like GenAI appear, even with a strong current market leadership, invest early in developing feature sets and technical capabilities that address new market demands. Rely on your own product strength and innovation to capture emerging opportunities, ensuring your offering stands strong regardless of external alliances or partnerships established for the current market as they may not carry over to the new market. Optimize Operations Continuously: Infrastructure costs can spiral quickly. Monitor unit economics religiously and optimize for efficiency from day one. Remember: sustainable growth beats aggressive growth every time. Your runway is your lifeline—protect it.

Every time I’ve seen a startup close a new round, the same thing happens: a major existential challenge shows up right after. Here's how to build resilience before the next crisis hits: ▶️ Build your decision-making muscle now. Observe how you make hard calls on smaller issues so you're ready when the big ones come. Document your decision-making process - you'll need to move fast when stakes are high. ▶️ Create financial runway buffers. Always assume you'll need 6 months longer than projected to hit your next milestone. Build this cushion into your fundraising targets and burn rate planning. When that unexpected pivot comes, you'll have breathing room instead of a missed deadline. ▶️ Strengthen your board relationships before you need them. Schedule informal check-ins with investors between board meetings. Share challenges early and often. When a crisis hits, you want advisors who already understand your business deeply, not people you're briefing for the first time. ▶️ Document your core assumptions. Write down what you believe about your market, product, and business model. Review these monthly. When disruption forces a strategy shift, you'll know exactly which assumptions broke and can pivot with clarity instead of chaos. From seed to IPO, every phase brings its own adrenaline spike from fighting off the next challenge. It’s easy to believe that once you hit that next milestone, things will finally smooth out. But in startups, those spikes are the norm - not the exception. Don’t waste energy hoping for calm; use that energy to build the systems and mindset that help you ride the spikes better when they come. Because they always do.

In the early days of GroWrk, I made a decision that saved us when our competitors started folding: I started by NOT raising tons of capital. At my previous VC-backed company, we raised $70M+ from investors. Then watched as the pandemic devastated our hospitality-focused business along with our competitors. That experience changed how I approached GroWrk: • We built real solutions before scaling • We became market makers, not market takers • We prioritized execution over fundraising noise The companies copying our model and raising huge sums to "disrupt" global IT logistics are now learning what we already knew: This problem is incredibly complex. Standardizing service levels across 150+ countries, from the US to war zones like Ukraine, isn't something you solve with capital alone. It requires: • Data • Infrastructure • And experience handling wildly different regulatory environments. Today's tariff surge is proving us right. While other companies scramble, we've spent years building the network that helps businesses slash global shipping costs by 40% and cut device delivery times in half. Turns out the best way to build resilience is solving the hard problems first.