BIO: Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book Lean Analytics has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders.
STORY: Alistair needed to raise capital for his startup. He received a series A investment of $20 million and gave up 50% equity in his company.
LEARNING: Don’t scale prematurely. Capture your market’s attention first.
“Risk is a necessary component of progress.”
Alistair Croll
Guest profile
Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book Lean Analytics has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders. He helped create the Data Science and Critical Thinking course at Harvard Business School and founded web performance pioneer Coradiant. He’s chaired some of the world’s leading tech events, including Strata and Cloud Connect, and is the co-founder of Forward50, the world’s biggest conference on digital government. He’s joining us from Montreal, Canada, where he’s hard at work on a new book Just Evil Enough, a still-stealthy mobile startup called Stroll, and launching the 2022 edition of Startupfest, Canada’s original startup conference.
Worst investment ever
Alistair started a startup in the business of running websites for people. So instead of having to buy dedicated hardware, web server, firewall, and so on to run your website, the company could have that stuff and let customers use a slice of it.
The company got a Series A investment of $20 million. In return, Alistair and his partners gave up half of the company. Alistair didn’t anticipate that this trend he’d foreseen was just the start of a much longer trend that led to modern-day cloud computing.
Alistair’s worst investment ever was receiving funding and giving up 50% equity in the company long before he had adequately understood the trend he was capitalizing on.
Lessons learned
- Don’t scale prematurely. Capture your market’s attention first.
- When pitching an idea, always ask yourself if you can change the behavior of a lucrative target market sustainably.
Andrew’s takeaways
- Your startup is not successful until you can sustainably keep people’s attention and focus on what you’re doing.
Actionable advice
De-risk the highest and most uncertain thing first.
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Alistair’s goal for the next 12 months is to market his new book Just Evil Enough.
Parting words
“We move the world forward by taking risks. So figure out what risks are worth it and then plunge headlong into them and don’t pull your punches.”
Alistair Croll
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Connect with Alistair Croll
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