Resilience and Execution

Today, we’re talking about resilience and execution.

4 years ago I invested in a company called Twine, that last year they spun out as a new company called Knoetic. And Knoetic announced a big funding round this week to much fanfare.

But most of it has been hard for that team. In recent years, they went through it all:

• They pivoted multiple times to their current product
• They lost a cofounder
• Then, they had to cleanup a bunch of engineering and customer issues

By any reasonable measure, they should have packed up and taken a job at Google. But Joseph and the team survived, and thrived, through execution:

1. Asking for help often. Joseph would always ask a range of experts and advisors for input on their upcoming decisions. He’d bring in the team, and then make a decision based on what had grown into a pretty large amount of data.
2. Building out a biz-ops team. They made some great hires in business operations, this meant significant parts of the business like community management, vendor selection and team administration, were taken off the CEO’s plate, so he could focus on whatever was the biggest drama elsewhere.
3. Setting narrow goals. The team’s goals were focused on growing revenue and community engagement. A simple formula, where an engaged community creates new customers, which grows revenue. And pretty much everyone on the team had to be working on something to push those 2 numbers up.

The result was a huge year for revenue growth in 2021 and an $18M round led by Accel.

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