Insights from 2024 Raleigh-Durham Startup Week
A couple weeks ago I met a bunch of experienced and aspiring entrepreneurs at the third annual Raleigh Durham Startup Week. This year 2-3 times more people attended, which in startup terms is rocket ship growth for the event.
This is also reflected in the broader growth in the Research Triangle, which has become the 10th fastest growing region in the country with the local economy ranking as the 3rd fastest. The startup ecosystem has only gotten more supportive for growing businesses with 80% of investments flowing into North Carolina from other parts of the country.
I had a bunch of great conversations and several big takeaways from the talks, with common themes across the talks ranging from first employees and how to scale your business to staying connected to the customer through all stages of growth. I tried to summarize a few highlights below. A big thanks to all of the speakers sharing these insights!
First hires and scaling
Multiple speakers stated that a startup’s “ability to scale is directly correlated to the founder's ability to give things up.” Anil Chawla (Founder of ArchiveSocial) and Ricci Wolman (Founder of Written Word Media) covered how to find and hire these early employees with some good advice on establishing culture early. As one of these early employees, I can say one of the best things Anil did when hiring me was give me a contracted project during the interview to verify we worked well together.
One piece of advice from Ricci, even if you’re filling multiple roles, define an organization chart and pencil yourself into using the RACI method. As people are hired, filling in roles becomes as easy as replacing your name in this responsibility chart. This keeps roles clearly defined and allows for people to grow into more senior roles as the founder hands off more responsibilities.
Revenue
Anne Jones (Founder of On the Team & District C) highlighted the importance of making sure new hires are in revenue generation roles. This can either through directly hiring sales people or by hiring people to take things off your plate so you can focus on that revenue generation.
Further emphasizing the importance of revenue, Marie-Angela Della Pia (ServiceTrade, Adwerx & Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative) provided a RevOps perspective. It’s impossible to go back in time to collect data related to a sale, so it is important to start accumulating that early.
Marie-Angela encouraged everyone to focus on building a strong RevOps pipeline early by keeping processes simple, repeatable and scalable. By establishing this mindset while you’re small it can delay the need to build a department until later. The data byproduct generated is just as important as the sales you’re making because it describes how your revenue engine actually works. This can be especially important early on when you don't know exactly what that engine is.
Stay close to the customer
A common refrain across the talks was staying close to the customer's needs. The point echoed across early stage companies, local high growth companies like Pendo, and all the way through experienced Silicon Valley companies like Doordash. Nobody is above the details and understanding the pain you’re solving with a product.
One of the more impactful examples of this came from Todd Olson (Founder/CEO of Pendo) who said they have an internal slack channel that printed real time feedback from users. We had a similar slack channel at ArchiveSocial which encouraged a high level of transparency, even when users were frustrated. When someone has a bad experience and a CEO cares enough to get on the phone to rectify the situation, that can lead to an amazing customer experience.
Growing the Triangle
As we think about the path forward, especially in the triangle, we should focus on what makes this area special while leaving room to grow. Our strong education system and momentum coming from recent successes can help propel the next stage of growth.
The opening keynote highlighted one of my favorite cultural components of the triangle. Anna Wilson (Duke, Google, Pandora & Doordash) called us to continue to raise all boats by making introductions. Everyone can find some ways to pay forward the support we've received in the past. This is how we all grow, by lifting each other up!
Love your insights Clark!