Part Four: Optimized Execution “Having a vision for what you want is not enough. Vision without execution is hallucination.” - Thomas Edison Working uniquely with businesses at what we define as the emerging growth phase of company development at PeakSpan means that every company we partner with has answered a lot of the existential questions startups are faced with: Can we build it? Will they buy it? Can we sell it on terms that make sense for us as a business? These fundamental issues – related to core technology/product, market opportunity/adoption, business model viability – represent binary risk levers. They simply must be satisfied, or they will kill the company. Navigating the whitewater rapids of the startup phase successfully means you’ve worked hard to mitigate and strip away those binary risk vectors. That’s the point in the company journey arc where we come in. While the next leg of the voyage is certainly no easier, less grueling, nor without risk, the type of risk encountered is very different. The scaleup phase is all about moving from ad hoc to repeatability, from volatility to consistency, and from creative and scrappy to systematized and process centric. Success involves intentionally placing bets in the right places, doubling down at the right times, and understanding the natural limitations of what the business can palpably digest without self-inflecting debilitating levels of indigestion. At the end of the day, making the right decisions related to where to add resources, ramp up investment and expand the team is only half the battle. No matter how attractive a market opportunity may be, how differentiated a platform appears, and how much capital a company has access to, if your team can’t execute, nothing else matters. Sustained execution is as critical as anything else in growth company development. It’s an essential ingredient in the recipe for resilient value creation. And sales execution in particular will end up either inhibiting or driving the ultimate value any business will achieve. - 16 -