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High-Growth Startups Require Sure Steps, Follow Savvy Pacesetters

Once you have a clear direction, quickly get going. (Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock.com)

Fancy and sometimes frantic footwork moves fledgling firms to the forefront. Experienced steps:

Fumble forward. Launching a high-growth startup takes big leaps. Too often, entrepreneurs make early mistakes that endanger business momentum.

“All of these things end up being real problems,” said David Rose, founder and CEO of international startup financing platform Gust.

He should know.

Dubbed "New York’s Archangel," Rose is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has founded or funded more than 90 pioneering companies.

Correct stumbles. “Whenever investors come into the picture, one-half to one-third of the money goes to cleaning up the stuff that wasn’t done right the first time,” Rose said.

To head off that problem, he compiled “The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business.”

The instructional tome is specifically for larger startups that aim to go public or be acquired by a bigger firm.

“It turns out that starting that kind of business gets very complicated very quickly,” he said.

Learn steps. Ross’ book covers sticky issues, such as how to incorporate, allocate equity, lawyer up the right way, establish a stock option plan and build a dream team.

“It’s about how you actually get things done,” Rose said.

Survey landscapes. Years of experience led to Rose’s paradoxical advice for launchers: Slow down, then start fast.

First, take time to assess an idea’s true potential.

“It helps if you figure out where you’re going before you start moving,” he said.

Take leaps. Once you have a clear direction, quickly get going. Rose recommends a lean startup approach called minimal viable product, or MVP.

“Get something out there to see what the customer likes,” he said. “Test, test, test. Then iterate, iterate, iterate.”

What shrewd entrepreneurs do: “Constantly course-correct.”

Adopt hustle. Bob Muglia, former president of Microsoft’s (MSFT) server and tools business, went into startup mode in 2014 as CEO of Snowflake Computing.

“Building a tech startup is incredibly hard. It takes a huge amount of energy,” he said.

The cloud data warehouse, which raised $71 million in series C funding, is at an all-too-common cusp.

“We’re really at the point of scaling the organization now,” Muglia said.

Move swiftly. When he joined the firm as employee No. 34, Muglia saw clear opportunities and challenges.

An engineering team he called “insanely great” needed guidance to stay on schedule and deliver a market-ready product.

“We were in alpha mode. We had a few customers playing with it but no one paying for it,” he said.

Muglia focused on establishing pricing and licensing.

“We sold our first license 45 days after I joined the company,” he said.

Gain strength. Muglia’s next priority was people -- “building the executive team and filling out the overall leadership of the company.”

After getting by with outside counsel, Muglia hired a chief legal officer.

“The whole company is so much better off,” he said. “These leaders make a huge difference.”

March forward. Muglia finds the startup environment energizing.

“The reason you work so hard is because everything you do makes a difference,” he said. “That’s a very different world from running a large organization.”

Big corporations have what Muglia called a B.S. quotient -- the percentage of work that’s really wheel-spinning organizational fluff.

“At Snowflake it’s zero,” he said. “That’s one dramatic difference.”

Image provided by Shutterstock.