Part Three: Strategic Knowledge Flow “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” - Benjamin Franklin Launching a business is as trying as it gets, and every step of the journey brings a distinct set of challenges and opportunities. The startup phase is characterized by firsts – the first version of the product, the first outside hire, the first closed deal. Progress in the early days is almost always a byproduct of grit and creativity, finding scrappy ways to make things happen. Crossing the chasm from startup to scaleup requires process, structure, and standardization to ensure the business matures with predictability and consistency. Software companies don’t produce physical goods. They don’t have inventory. They don’t manage manufacturing dependencies. There is no assembly line to optimize. The business value is instead the amalgamation of the thoughts and ideas of the brilliant minds on the team, which is most valuable when synthesized cohesively and applied uniformly to achieve a common goal. Supporting and enabling the growth of the organizational knowledge asset will ultimately play a pivotal role in catalyzing the growth of the business. Knowledge – related to the company’s value proposition, market positioning, competitive landscape, go-to-market strategy, and a laundry list of other meaty topics – becomes the fuel required to power the organizational engine in the scaleup phase. That precious resource resides only in the minds of the founders/early team initially but must be extracted from the heads of a few and disseminated methodically across the entire organization as it expands. - 11 -