Masters of Scale summary

So as soon as funding is in place, you can start scaling up – right?

Not quite. Instead, make strategic use of that beginning phase when you have a small, loyal – even fanatical – group of users. Find your early superfans and hypercritics, and take time to learn from their passionate feedback. Figure out what your guardrails are, what you’ll tolerate, and who to schmooze – including industry bigwigs and government agencies. Once you scale up, it will be tough to dig this deep or change course.

Designer Tory Burch wanted to launch her retail store in New York City during Fashion Week. She had customers, friends and family, media, and a brand-new collection of exciting clothes. There was just one problem. She had no doors to open. The bright orange door that she had custom-designed hadn’t arrived.

She had to make a choice. Should she hold off on the opening until everything was perfect, or should she let the hoards in through the empty doorway?

You know how your English teacher always said to show, not tell? Well, following that well-worn piece of advice can help give you a leg up in the world of scaling a startup.

Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook exclusively for Harvard students. When he announced that he would extend it to Yale, Princeton, and other schools, the initial users expressed their dismay – but it didn’t stop them from using, and growing, the service. 

Ev Williams was working on a podcast-publishing platform called Odeo when he got some bad news: their behemoth competitor, Apple, had the same idea. This signaled the death knell for his product. 

Knowing that chances of scaling his startup to go head-to-head with Apple were close to nil, Williams went back to the drawing board. He called his team together and held a hackathon – an event that gets participants to brainstorm and develop a novel product or solution in one long sitting.

When Angela Ahrendts went to work for Apple after a stratospheric career as CEO of Burberry, it was a tough transition. Everything was different. She had gone from fashion to technology, England to America – and, suddenly, she was the boss of 70,000 people.

Ahrendts knew she needed to communicate her vision to all her new employees. But, as a parent of three teens, she knew that young Apple employees were unlikely to read long emails. So she made a three-minute iPhone video that was natural and real; she didn’t even edit out a phone call from her daughter.

Howard Schultz was seven years old when he came home from school to find his father lying in bed, covered in a cast from hip to ankle. The World War II veteran had been involved in an accident at work and was now immobilized, both physically and financially – he had absolutely no medical coverage, benefits, or protection.

Decades later, when Schultz became the owner of a little coffee operation called Starbucks, he made a deliberate decision: he’d build a company that took care of its employees, even before making a real profit. Starbucks became the first company in America to give every employee – even part-time workers – comprehensive health insurance.