PART 2 – Paradigm Shifting as Companies Grow: Commandos, Infantrymen, and Policemen

This is Part Two of Paradigm Shifting as Companies Grow: Commandos, Infantrymen, and Policemen. Make sure to read part one for the context for this entry.

The Pivot Point
When I sat down with my CEO, it was a different conversation that I thought we were going to have. He discussed some concepts he shared in his blog recently.

At the beginning of a startup you need a Commando who will just take the beach-head. A Commando will break all the rules and just execute. He will never say this is not my job. He will just take the hill. Later as a company grows you need infantrymen: they will build supply lines and they will set you up for large scale growth by making processes repeatable and predictable. On the downside though infantrymen effectively pour cement on your business plan so if you need to change it or need to be low cost they are not the people for you. Finally once you have a successful venture you bring in the policemen who will make sure nothing is broken and will optimize things on the margin. Policemen may still make the company $100M by tweaking some efficiency by 1% because the scale of the company is so large at that point.

The key to running a startup is to hire the right people at the right stage. Hire an infantryman before you have traction and suddenly you’ll spend 3x more because they need a team to get anything done or you’ll iterate the product 1/3 slower because planning and measuring will add tremendous overhead. Hire an infantryman too late and you’ll see outages and crashes. The biggest trouble with executive hires is that usually most big name executives have only learned to be policemen or at best infantryman. They don’t like to be commando’s and are frequently not very good at it. The best hire of course is one that can behave differently in each stage.

I was blown away.

That moment was a paradigm shift. My past jobs were different from Riya: Audible needed Infantrymen, LowerMyBills.com needed policemen and all I knew was how to drive growth in channels that were already at least partly open. I had been a commando early in my life in politics, but not in business. I had never thought this way in marketing.

It was a pivot point, I realized that I knew more than enough about search, but I needed a different paradigm for making decisions that were right for Riya. I just needed to embrace my inter-commando.

Final Thoughts
I look at seasoned executives in our business, Todd Crawford, Lisa Riolo, Steve Denton, Tim Storm, and Matt Coffin (my old boss at LowerMyBills.com) and I’m inspired by their flexibility. They have all worked through the three stages of a company’s growth; it’s pretty impressive. Others in our community have not been able make the transition, yet others like Shawn Collins have found they are much happier as Commandos and doing their own thing than working for companies.

What I love the most about affiliate marketing is the amazing entrepreneurial sprit of affiliates which is part of being a commando, but to get to the next step, people need to migrate their thinking to infantrymen and become much more oppertunitistic than entrepreneurial. Some affiliates have chosen to grow while others have not because they are just happier being commandos.

Also, I raised this now because Riya 2.0 is about to launch and Munjal has been chronicling the process in a blog with a compelling narrative that presents tons of concepts for building a company. Since the affiliate marketing world is full of the best marketers and entrepreneurs around, I think Munjal offers some business insight anchored in a strong narrative that is worth a read.

And so you all just don’t think I’m buttering up to my boss, here is a quote from another blogger who is a VC: “Readers interested in a remarkably detailed perspective on how startups navigate changes of course should check out Munjal’s blog, which reads almost like a thriller as it walks us through Riya’s evolution after its launch.”