I've built 4 companies.
Each one has been bigger than the previous one.
Here's my story:
• In college, I built my first business.
We did 100k+ of rev. in months.It was my first taste of startups, but I realized I needed to rebuild my skills to build a big company.
• My first job was at Optimizely.
At the time, it was one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. My goal was to learn how people were building billion-dollar companies so quickly.
• 3 years later, I started Horizons.
We built a 7-figure, profitable bootstrapped company in a year. Progress! But, it wasn’t a venture scale business and required too much work to be a lifestyle business. The business worked, but it needed 120% of two founders. Hiring ourselves away didn’t seem possible because a business of that size couldn’t attract the A+ talent it needed.
• 5 months later, we started Pangaea.
Our goal was to capitalize on a trend growing $100B+ per year: International e-commerce. So we built a rocket internet of DTC brands. Our holding company was designed to build specialized international tech, operations, and GTM for brands that our company incubated.
• Within 3.5 years we:
We built an amazing team that took a bet on our vision Grew 2 sizeable, 8-figure brands. Raised $70M+
• Fast forward another ~4 years and we spun-out our entire international platform to create OpenBorder
Our bet on the holding company model had a flaw: Smaller brands were resource intensive and got harder over time. Whereas, bigger brands would get easier and clearly maximize impact/value/scale. Our bet on the international trend was spot on: ~50% of our revenue was international -more than any company at our scale + growth trajectory we met. We had already hired a senior executive for Pangaea that was the right person to make our 8 figure brand, multi-9 figure brands. So we spun out our platform team (engineering, ops, tax and compliance) to start OpenBorder. Our goal is to help the 1000s of entrepreneurs capitalize on the 2T cross border e-commerce opportunity without the capital and time it took us.
A few thoughts:
• The effort to build a 1M business and 100M is the same: a heavy work week. Sometimes the latter is actually easier (better talent, capital and scale).
• Ambition is attractive. Tesla attracts the best for a reason.
• The 3 things I bet on for unicorns:(1) Optimize for a unique angle (learned @ Horizons) (2) In a megatrend (learned @ Horizons, added @ Pangaea)(3) With a high personal interest (do it everytime)