The Science of Re-establishing Growth with Mark Roberge (Former CRO of Husbpot)

Mark Roberge, the Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and former CRO of Hubspot and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, joined us for a lesson in growth.

"When to scale?" and "How fast?"

These two questions are mission-critical for startup organizations. Yet, as entrepreneurs, we lack a rigorous approach to answering them.

In this session, we discovered the science of scaling and the data-driven approach to uncovering answers to these critical questions. After peering inside the go-to-market machinery of hundreds of startups over the last three years, Mark Roberge found the following five issues as the most common diagnoses for failed scale attempts:

✔ Premature focus on top-line revenue generation in lieu of consistent customer value creation
✔ Inadequate, non-data-driven definition of product-market-fit
✔ Misunderstanding of go-to-market capabilities needed before hiring salespeople
✔ Front-loading sales hires at the beginning of the year rather than pacing throughout the year
✔ Confusing temporary competitive advantage with sustainable competitive advantage

The resulting Science of Scaling approach has been the bedrock of Stage 2 Capital's method in guiding entrepreneurs and their new ventures through the scaling process. The Science of Scaling defines each stage of scale, establishes a quantifiable measures for each stage, structures the sequence and signals of when to move from one stage to the next, and explores the optimal go-to-market design of each stage."