Growth Doesn't Kill Startups. Management Does | Hunter Hastings

Summary

Podcast Summary — Liftoff with Keith: “Growth Doesn’t Kill Startups. Management Does”
Guest: Hunter Hastings | August 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, host Keith Newman examines the provocative thesis: “Growth doesn’t kill startups, management does,” with renowned entrepreneur, investor, and author Hunter Hastings. Drawing from his new book, Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap by Finding and Unleashing Entrepreneurial Leaders, Hunter explores how traditional management practices can stifle innovation, and reveals alternative organizational models focused on customer-centricity, rapid learning, and entrepreneurial leadership. The conversation weaves personal anecdotes, practical strategies, and memorable examples to help founders and growth leaders build companies that scale without the bureaucratic drag.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Administration Trap & Venture Mode

• The Administration Trap: Over time, startups increasingly layer on management, compliance, and KPIs, resulting in internal focus and self-management instead of serving the customer.
  • Quote: “It’s about internal control...and you forget the customer.” — Hunter, [02:38]
• Venture Mode: The antithesis, focusing first and relentlessly on improving the customer’s life, letting profit follow as a signal, not the primary goal.
  • Quote: "Profit is the signal from the marketplace that you’re doing a good job for the customer. It's not the purpose of the business." — Hunter, [03:34]

2. Organizational Models That Scale Without Bureaucracy

• Example: Handu, China: Thousands of 3-person e-commerce teams experiment continuously, using a software layer for feedback—no middle management ([04:56]).
  • Quote: “There’s no middle management. The software layer relates to the back end... continuous improvement without any middle management.”
• Example: Nvidia: CEO Jensen Huang maintains 62 direct reports to avoid layers ([06:06]).
• Example: Haier: Breaks into “micro-enterprises” (max 80 people); each serves customers and holds a P&L ([07:44]).
• Hunter's Advice: For enterprises stuck in bureaucracy, create “pirate ships”—entrepreneurial pilot teams—and let success become contagious ([06:07]).

3. On Balance and Turbulence

• Hunter challenges the notion of “balance” in organizations, citing the value of economic and organizational turbulence to drive innovation ([07:44]).
  • “I’m pretty suspicious of the word balance…[markets are] in constant turbulence, which is how new ideas come out.” — Hunter

4. Customer Focus vs. Internal Metrics

• Most companies obsess over internal metrics; Hunter recommends qualitative, customer-oriented windows ([10:26]).
  • Quote: “What you need to look for is metrics and windows that look at the customer... customer reaching out to look for new products because they’re so happy with the old products.” — Hunter, [10:45]
• Austrian economics influence: The firm exists to serve the customer's needs; the customer is “the boss” ([11:52]).
  • “The customer is the boss and they have the final verdict.” — Hunter

5. Value Creation, Intuition, and Experimentation

• Founders must operate from empathy and imagination, not just direct customer feedback ([13:37]).
  • Steve Jobs approach: Customers don’t always know what they want until they see it.
  • Quote: “It’s imagination, it's intuition… lots and lots of learning through experimentation. We believe that action, rather than strategy, is the right way to go.” — Hunter, [13:37]

6. Entrepreneurial Leaders: Identifying and Unleashing Them

• Traditional leadership (authority/charisma) ≠ entrepreneurial leadership.
  • Look for rebels, the experimenters, those who’d rather take on challenging projects than climb the hierarchy ([15:33]).
  • Advice: “It's a mindset, it’s an attitude. And you look for that as opposed to the authority of leadership.” — Hunter, [15:33]

7. Critique of MBA/Traditional Business Education

• MBAs taught for old businesses; emphasize control, not creativity.
  • Proposal: An “MBE”—enterprise-focused, rooted in experience and customer-centric value ([16:53]).
  • “MBAs think that their customer is… the student or maybe the student’s parents. But in fact, it should be the hiring corporation.” — Hunter

8. AI and the Future of Venture Mode

• AI accelerates Venture Mode: faster experimentation and knowledge acquisition ([19:52]).
  • Pitfall: Using AI for efficiency/cost-cutting is administrative-trap thinking.
  • Quote: “AI doesn't have the imagination… but it can speed up experiments and inquiries… AI is going to help economic growth and firm growth tremendously.” — Hunter

9. Disappearance of Traditional Management

• As AI and new org designs take hold, the ‘manager’ career path atrophies in favor of decentralized entrepreneurial roles ([21:46]).
  • Organizational productivity could double or triple by eliminating administrative drag ([22:39]).

10. Learning from Both Success and Failure

• Hunter shares stories from his time as founder and CEO, demonstrating that success always pivots on serving the customer, and loss comes from missing the customer’s needs ([23:40]).
  • “The technology was terrific, but the customer was really concerned… we never got that assurance quite right.” — Hunter

11. Rethinking the Concept of the Corporation

• Former beliefs about corporations as persistent institutions are outmoded; now, agility and system thinking are crucial in the digital, global environment ([25:36]).

12. Common Mistakes by Founders

• Over-focusing on technology/features (not economics or business utility).
  • Over-reliance on TAM (total addressable market) instead of starting with small, real, engaged customers ([27:13]).
  • “That’s not thinking about a customer and then getting it right for that customer and then scaling up from that customer.” — Hunter

13. Number One Founder's Priority: Build the Right Team

• The founding team must be balanced, creative, and work together with the right mindset; personal involvement by the founder is critical ([29:58]).
  • Quote: “Spend a lot of time… on hiring your team. Do it personally. Don’t let somebody else do it for you. And make sure it’s the mindset…” — Hunter

14. Organizational Innovation — Forward Deployed Engineers

• Valley trend: Engineers embedded with customers, acting as 'customer’s partners' to increase adoption—more evidence of shifting focus from firm-centric to customer-centric innovation ([31:25]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Hunter on the perils of bureaucracy:
  “You add another layer of management, then a compliance layer… KPI’s and metrics… What happens in the end is you’re focused on self management, internal management and you forget the customer.” [02:38]
• On metrics:
  “Customer satisfaction and customer reaching out to look for new products because they're so happy with the old products. Those are the kinds of things that you're trying to look for. So they're qualitative more than they're quantitative.” [10:45]
• AI & speed:
  “We hate the term ‘fail fast’ because it’s not failing, it’s experimenting and learning at an accelerated pace.” [19:52]
• Team composition:
  “Build your team very, very carefully with the right people. Really, really hard to do, but it pays back the time...” [29:58]
• Rebellion as signal:
  “They’re often kind of rebellious.... but they’re the ones you want in your best projects or your most adventurous projects.” [15:33]
• Closing wisdom for founders:
  “Just build your team very, very carefully with the right people… the sparks that fly in creative magic, as opposed to anything on a resume, including an MBA.” [29:58]

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Suggested Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:38] Administration Trap vs. Venture Mode
• [04:56] Organizational Models: Handu, Nvidia, Haier
• [10:26] Metrics: Internal vs. Customer-Focused
• [13:37] Value Creation and Experimentation
• [15:33] Entrepreneurial Leadership
• [16:53] MBA vs. MBE Mindset
• [19:52] The AI Acceleration Effect
• [21:46] The End of Traditional Management
• [29:58] Hunter’s Top Advice: Team Building
• [31:25] Forward Deployed Engineer/Customer Partner Innovation

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Final Takeaways

1. Guard Against Administrative Bloat: As startups grow, resist the lure to solve complexity with management layers.
2. Relentless Customer Focus: Organize around customer needs, not internal metrics or hierarchy.
3. Experimentation Wins: Move fast, experiment, and let learning drive strategy.
4. Culture of Entrepreneurship: Find, empower, and protect the entrepreneurial leaders within.
5. AI Supercharges, But Does Not Replace, Human Innovation: Use tech for acceleration and learning, not bureaucracy.
6. Build the Right Team, Personally: Team mindset and chemistry outweigh resumes and pedigrees.
7. The Future is Agile and Customer-Centric: Organizational success depends on maintaining customer connection and avoiding the administrative trap.

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For more: Find Hunter Hastings at hunterhastings.com, and his book “Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap” at venturemode.biz.

Transcript

[Sponsor Voice - Accenture]

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn [e-mail] Spotify

[Sponsor Voice - Indeed]

when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed. Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

[Keith (Host)]

The sponsor of Liftoff with Keith is the one and only Compass Strategic Advisors.com an experienced partner to help you navigate everything from cap tables to stock option and compensation plans and all types of backroom and marketing services. There is no better friend to the startup CEO than Compass. Check them out@compass strategic advisors.com okay, so here's the question. How do you scale a company without scaling the bureaucracy that eventually kills the entrepreneurial behavior that made the company successful in the first place? If you really think about that, it's a fundamental question exists with almost every company I've met with and I was talking to my guest today about how we've done 150 of these and they're all unique, but they all certain fall into certain categories too. Today's guest has more than 35 years on both the entrepreneurial side, a CEO, an investor, and operating executive, and business school faculty member. Hunter Hastings is the co author of Venture Mode Escape the Administration Trap by Finding and Unleashing Entrepreneurial Leaders. His central argument is provocative. Growth doesn't kill startups, management does. And Hunter, we're going to get into some of that stuff, but it's interesting. You know, this idea of Venture Mode and administrative trap really catch my eye because I have an intuitive sense what you're talking about, but I want to hear exactly what you're talking about. So Hunter, welcome to Liftoff and share with me what exactly is the Administration Trap?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, thank you. It's very nice to be here Keith. And in the book which I co wrote with with Mark Packard, who's a professor teaching entrepreneurship and business at Florida Atlantic University. So you get the research side and the practical side from the two authors. And administration mode we've identified as the way that companies have been run for a long, long time in America and everywhere else in the West. And it's about internal control. It's when they get to a certain size they have real coordination problems and the instinct is to add a layer of management and then it gets more complicated. And so you add another layer of management and then you add another layer to supervise the managers. Then you add a compliance layer to make sure that the managers are doing what they should. And then you add the KPIs and the metrics and the reporting to make sure that the compliance is the way you want it to be. And what happens in the end is you're focused on self management, internal management and you forget the customer. So venture mode is the opposite. It's starting with the customer. It's got a different purpose for the firm which was improve people's lives to make their lives better, to enable them. And when you do that successfully you get revenue, you get profit. Profit is the signal from the marketplace that you're doing a good job for the customer. It's not the purpose of the business. And when you start focusing on profit, you can start to make bad decisions. You might lower a cost because it increases your margin, but it reduces the quality of the customer experience. You might try and cut the number of headcount because headcount is a cost. And so you start to make those decisions in administration mode. In venture mode you don't do that. It's relentless pursuit of new value for the customer by everybody in the business and removing all the potential barriers to letting them do that.

[Keith (Host)]

So I love that. How does that start to take shape then? Is that not hiring too many managers or what do you do organizationally that facilitates that, that, that energy around venture mode.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

So there's two ways to think about this I think Keith. If you look at some new companies, they have built a, an organization that doesn't suffer from those problems. They've never added the management. One of the the companies in the book is a Chinese company called Handu H A N D U and it's a multi billion dollar corporation. It runs with thousands of front end e commerce stations. They're staffed by typically three people. A marketing person, a technology person and a and a procurement person. They run experiments all the time, just like E commerce. They're offering things, they're seeing what people will buy. They, there's thousands of those. That data is Fed back into a software layer in the middle of the company. There's no middle management. The software layer relates to the back end. Produce more of this, produce less of that, and then it ships that information back to the front end. So you've got this closed loop of continuous improvement without any middle management. So that says it's possible. You look at Nvidia under Jensen Huang. He famously has, I think, at the last count, 62 direct report.

[Keith (Host)]

I love that.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah, he doesn't want anybody in between him and the front lines. He wants emails from everybody in the company, which he reads and responds to. Elon Musk famously wants to talk directly to the engineers because they're the ones with the knowledge. So there's this number of modern companies that have created this new organization. The question now is, can you get out of administration mode? When you're locked into it, it's very hard. You got to dig up the ground you're standing on. So that's pretty tough. And it's removal of barriers. It's identifying the barriers, the bureaucratic and administrative barriers, stripping them away. We found that the best way to do it is to create a pirate ship to find people in your organization who are entrepreneurial leaders. They're maybe dissatisfied, they're grumpy. The kind of people that don't fit the administrative mode and maybe set up a pilot, a new company, a new venture, a new project, a new unit, and let them run their business that way. And then it will be contagious. Everybody else in the company will want that kind of approach. So it's really, really hard for the big corporation, Keith. And that's why they don't live forever. Right.

[Keith (Host)]

I love the point of both unbundling and bundling into an organization as you grow. So the idea about direct reports and few direct reports and fewer documents, I guess that. But what is the right balance? Right. I mean, that's ultimately the question. Meetings, approvals, dashboards, how many people should manage how many people? You know? What are your thoughts there?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah, I'm pretty suspicious of the word balance. I know how you're thinking of using it, but it comes from a concept in economics called equilibrium. That markets eventually get to equilibrium between supply and demand. Well, they don't. They're constantly churning and swirling and they're in constant turbulence, which is how new ideas come out and new things happen. And so I think it's the turbulence and the innovation and the uncertainty that you want. You want to cultivate that. One of the examples also in the book, Keith, is a Chinese company called Haier, which is A It's a $30 billion company. And the way they solved the problem was to break the company up into what they call micro enterprises. There are thousands of them, and the way they coordinated is each micro enterprise serves consumers and they call it closeness to the consumer. They're always figuring out what the consumer wants, developing new products and responding. That way, when they get to a certain size, they just form another micro enterprise. So they never get bigger than about 75 or 80 people. Within those micro enterprises, there's a marketing microenterprise which will help the production microenterprise. There's an accounting microenterprise. Everybody's got a P and L. Everybody is making a profit. And so there are just many ways to get to the balance, as you call it, without layers of management.

[Sponsor Voice - Accenture]

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn [e-mail] Spotify when you need to

[Sponsor Voice - Indeed]

build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

[Keith (Host)]

What is the what is the common mistake you hear when you're brought in to see a company? What are I'm curious, how do you go in and start. What are the questions you start to look at?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, it. It often is exhibited by the metrics. What are you trying to achieve? What are your KPIs? And when they're numerical, they're about internal ratios. You think of of things like profit margins and return on invested capital.

[Keith (Host)]

Yep.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

They're the company comparing it with itself. And what you need to look for is metrics and windows that look at the customer. What's the customer condition? And even though you've got to be a little bit imaginative. So customer retention, again, that's a ratio. You know, how many stayed, how many left. But customer satisfaction and customer reaching out to look for new products because they're so happy with the old products. Those are the kinds of things that you're trying to look for. So they're qualitative more than they're quantitative. That's a really hard thing for corporations brought up in administration mode because it's all about numbers. So you look for whether there's a feeling, an ability to use qualitative data about customers and how they feel.

[Keith (Host)]

Your thinking is sort of rooted in Austrian economics and the idea of consumer sovereignty. The value is ultimately determined by the customer. Is that always true? Is the customer always right? What do you look for in terms of that time when you adopt the feedback and reject the customer? Feedback?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, the customer is always right is not the expression I like to use, Keith. The customer is the boss and they have the final verdict. And so whatever you offer to them, it's their verdict that counts. And so you, that's the constant rule. Yes, you, you never stop from that being the rule. But it can be used in big corporations. I started life at Procter and Gamble and I was in the marketing department. And my customer was Mom. And we thought about mom all the time about what kind of washing up liquid and detergent and so on that she wanted. She was the boss. And if she didn't like the aroma, then we found a new aroma that she would like. If she didn't think her clothes were getting clean enough, we made it better cleaning. And so I learned that right at the beginning from a big corporation. Your, your customer in that case was Mom. Mom's the boss. And that's the rule that you always follow.

[Keith (Host)]

Did you ever bump into Scott Cook at your P and G days? He's the founder of, of Intuit and Quicken.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah, I never bumped into him, but he's, he's typical of the, the P and G graduate, you know, he had a great insight at Intuit, as I'm sure you know. And they were adding more and more kinds of capabilities to their software to help people do accounting. But he had the insight. People don't want to do accounting. They want to be relieved of accounting. So don't give me all these bells and whistles. Just make it easy and convenient. That's a great example of the customer being the boss.

[Keith (Host)]

Customer centric. But in practice, they often build what the product team wants and they go, they go out and they sell. And so I guess what's genuine value creation actually look like?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

I like the story that Jensen Wang tells about that, Keith. And when they first built their, their first game board at Nvidia, they were in the video game business and had all the bells and whistles, and it failed in the marketplace, and it failed for reasons like backward compatibility. People couldn't use their old consoles, and it didn't have good connections to the audio, and so they got lousy audio. And Jensen said, after that, I learned a big lesson. Then I built what the engineers want to build. I didn't build what the market wanted, meaning the customer. And so you have that mentality all the time. What. What is the market? What's the customer want? And so you. You're constantly doing that. You can't have them tell you what they want. That's the famous Steve Jobs quote, that they only know what they want when you show it to them. So you've got to use this empathy, this ability to get inside their heads and say, how would their lives be better and how can I improve their lives in the future? It's imagination, it's intuition. So there's no processes for it. It's a state of mind. And then lots and lots of learning through experimentation. We believe that action, rather than strategy, is the right way to go. Act, do something, learn, repeat.

[Keith (Host)]

That totally resonates with me, too. And not. Not my own life as an entrepreneur or founder, but as my consulting hat on working with dozens of. Dozens of companies last few years. And. And you know, the people that wait for it to happen versus the people that go make it happen.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Right?

[Keith (Host)]

So on that note, the idea of finding entrepreneurial leaders, you know, the subtitle of your book is about finding unleashing the entrepreneurial leader. How does a CEO identify those leaders within a company? And once you find them, what do most companies do accidentally that potentially suffocates them?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Leadership is a controversial subject, as I'm sure you've discussed on your many podcasts, Keith, and the way it's taught in business school, it's about authority. It's about charisma. You're smarter than others and you can lead them, which means you've got to have followers. Entrepreneurial leaders means the ones who are willing to try something different, the ones who learn by experiment. So as I mentioned earlier, they're often kind of rebellious. They'd rather try something else. But they're the ones you want in your best projects or your most adventurous projects. They're the ones who step up to the plate and say, I'd like to do that. Instead of being promoted to vice president, I'd rather be a director over here running this new project. And it's a mindset, it's an attitude. And you look for that as opposed to the authority of leadership. It's, it's a psychological approach in many ways. We call it the mindset. So you've got to be able to detect that mindset.

[Keith (Host)]

You were right into my next question, which was, I don't know why, but I had this feeling like you were going to be part of that, quote, MBA mindset. But you're, you're kind of not. You're pretty tough on that. Right. So I don't know, is there a problem with the MBA mindset or, or the way people apply that education once they enter a company?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, we have a number of points in the book about that, Keith. And remember my partner Mark.

[Keith (Host)]

Okay, I'll read. I've got to read the book now.

[Sponsor Voice - Accenture]

Yeah.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

He teaches MBA, so he knows where he speaks. The MBAs teach things for the old businesses, not the new businesses. And they teach things you can pass exams on. So like accounting and scenario planning and financials and things like that. But everything we've talked about is intuition, imagination, creativity, experimentation. And so the MBA mindset of control, we think is the wrong one. We put forward an idea we called the MBE. So the E would be enterprise or entrepreneurship, and that would be two things. Learn the principles, the kinds of principles I've talked about, which is the customer's the boss. What they say is valuable is what, what leads the way. So we call it evaluation. And it's subjective. It's what they think. Like Jensen said, I could give them this great engineered game board, and they didn't want it subjectively because it didn't give them a good experience. So you got to learn that, that value, that subjective value, and then go get some experience. So in our MBE, we would have students go and take a kind of internship or apprenticeship, perhaps at a corporation or sponsoring corporation, and they'd learn to do real projects in real time with real people and real resources, and they'll learn through experience. And let me just make a point about that, and that is MBAs think that their customer is. Or the universities teach MBAs, their customer is the student or maybe the student's parents. But in fact, it should be the hiring corporation. So when we talk about the MBE, we want the hiring corporation to be our customer. They want to buy the students that were turning out in the MBE. They're going to test them in the apprenticeship, and they'll make the deal if one is good. So we think universities have the wrong customer in mind which is one of the principles of Venture Mode. Know your customer well.

[Keith (Host)]

We know, we know those programs have to evolve, and I think most of them get it to a certain point. Another issue or event that's having us rethink speed and evolution, in a way is this AI era question, right? In this, in this day and age, we're hearing about these really small teams building companies moving very fast. Even the largest companies are evolving at breakneck speed. And a lot of teams, you're staggered by how small they are and yet how much revenue they're producing, how much technology they're sharing with the market. So does AI make Venture Mode easier or does it make the administrative trap even more dangerous?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

I think AI doesn't change the Venture Mode concept, it accelerates it. So exactly as you said, Keith, you can run more experiments more quickly and get the patterns of the data back and refeed it back into more experiments. It does accelerate. It has more knowledge because it can access all the world's knowledge. Right. It's been trained on the Internet. And what you find in companies, some of them use AI to automate processes and bureaucracy and they worry about the cost of tokens and so they reduce the cost of head count. And that's not the way to use AI. I don't think the way to use AI is in Venture Mode, thinking up new ideas. Now, AI doesn't have the imagination, it doesn't have the human emotional commitment that's required for entrepreneurship, but it can speed up those, those experiments and those inquiries. It can build a prototype faster, it can test the prototype faster. So you just accelerate the process. And you look at some of these companies now that are growing, if you look at the S&P 500, I think the top five are growing at 10 times the rate of the other 495. So speed is an advantage there. And in the administration mode, we tend to be a little bit scared of speed. Right? How can you be accurate and perfect when you're going so fast? But in fact, that's not what you do in Venture Mode. You keep learning and trying. We hate the term fail fast because it's not failing, it's experimenting and learning at an accelerated pace. So AI is going to help economic growth and firm growth tremendously.

[Keith (Host)]

So in the scenario where there's a five person team doing what it used to be, a 50 person team, what happens to the traditional management model?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, I think we eliminate, quote, managers, unquote. So management is, as I said, this is this form of internal control. And if you have A good career, you get promoted to a higher and higher level of management, that's going to go away. The number of entrepreneurs is going to increase inside the firm, running projects, doing experiments, doing coordination. Everybody in the firm can have an entrepreneurial role because about creating value. And I don't think there'll be fewer roles, there'll be more and more of them because this accelerating process just reveals more and more opportunities to create new value. So I'm really excited about the future. I think it'd be great. We'll will lose a lot of managers and will gain a lot of entrepreneurs.

[Keith (Host)]

But the underlying point is productivity at the individual level.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah, in the book we have a calculation, it's a little bit rough, but since the end of the Second World War, the rate of productivity growth in the US has been about half of what it could be if you didn't have the administrative mode sclerosis. Now it's a, it's a rough number, but there are various academics who've done that research and come up with a similar number. But in the individual firm, as you said, you can, you can increase productivity growth tremendously through acceleration and focus on value creation. So yeah, we think productivity growth in the US could be double or triple what it is now. Easily.

[Keith (Host)]

Interesting. So you've had a couple different roles as an entrepreneur, a CEO, a senior operating exec, and always fun to be in the catbird seat as a VC or venture investor. Which one taught you the most about what actually enables that, that, that company growth trajectory? Where did you, where did you pick that?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah, yeah, I've had the reinforcement about the customer a couple of times, Keith, positively and negatively. So one of the businesses I started was a, a global consulting company about building global brands back in the day when they, quite as positive or usual as they are now, you know, they were just growing and we, we developed some good principles for growing global brands in local countries. So how do you adopt, adapt the, the global brand to the local country? That was very successful because our customer really wanted it. The, the collaboration with the customer was great. We had great results. So it was about getting the right customer for the right service. Another technology company that I was hired to be the CEO as a restart, as they call it in Silicon Valley, it had lost its way and the reason was we didn't get the customer right. So the technology was, was fabulous. It was in the marketing and media space to help with, with what we used to call back then digital assets. You know, digitizing what had been on film and what had Been in print and so on, and the technology was terrific, but the customer was really concerned about things like storage and security and the quality that they were used to with film. Would it be the same in digital? You know, back in the early days of digital media. And so we never got that assurance quite right. And so the company didn't grow as fast as it, as it could have done. So those are both reinforcing about the customer as the boss, negatively and positively. I've done both.

[Keith (Host)]

Sometimes you learn the most during those downtimes and those you don't get your time back.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

I find these.

[Keith (Host)]

So what did you, what did you believe earlier in your career that you no longer believe today?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, we used to think that the, the corporation was persistent and an institution that pillars up society and the right thing to do is have a career. And to have a career, you've got to persistently follow the rules of the corporation. And you're a bit of a renegade if you don't do that and you'll never be successful. All of those institutional rules. Well, clearly that's not the case now. And we've got to find new forms of coordination. I mean, a lot of your questions, I would put them in the category of coordinations. And we really don't know how that works. There's a whole theory around systems thinking now that we don't really know how systems work because there's no cause and effect. You can't isolate one cause and get an effect. There's so many variables, changes interacting with each other. It's global, it's digital. And you just, you just can't identify one cause and one effect and, and use that to go forward. So you just got to learn how the system works, how it evolves and, and get into the space where it evolved, where you wanted to.

[Keith (Host)]

Yeah, well, I'm going to go for the, the slight contrarian close here. Hunter, if you don't mind, I, I've asked you a bunch of questions and you've been right on point, you know, following, you know, this, this theme. But what are founders doing today that you just simply bristle, you know, you just say this is just not the right way to go. What are some of those signals that you see or things that you hear?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, I think there, there are two. One is, is the devotion to technology and improving the technology. And what you said earlier about, about new features and the way to think about technology, it's not economics, it's not business. It evolves on its own, which is a wonderful thing. But Matt Ridley in his book talked about tinkerers. Your technology advances through tinkering. It's just recombining things in new ways, in great new ways that creates breakthroughs. You've got to think about business. How is the customer going to use it? And when I hear things like tam, total addressable market, that's numbers, that's calculations, that's spreadsheets, that's not thinking about a customer and then getting it right for that customer and then scaling up from that customer. So I just want to hear founders think more and more about who's the customer, who's the market with a small AM as opposed to a tam, and really think that way. The technology will be the technology, it will evolve and you can be a really smart founder and use it and in different ways. But you've got to think about the customer.

[Keith (Host)]

Yeah, I mean, that's a brilliant place to end. But I'm not going to let you go yet. I got a couple more minutes I want to ask. We touched on a bunch of themes, but I wonder if you still are holding on to some other thought or two that you can share with a founder who's listening today? They're growing fast. They have questions about their hiring plan as well as their product roadmap, as well as their go to market and all that stuff. But what's the one thing you'd like to tell them to tell them to protect at all costs?

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[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Well, if you think about the elements that are going to be successful for a new company, you've got the market and you've got technology and you've got the team, and you already mentioned it, building the right team, the best team, the best balanced team, the team that do marketing as well as product and can do the accelerated learning that we talked about and work together and be fast without being abrasive. That's really, really hard to do. So spend a lot of time, at least initially, on hiring your team. Do it personally. Don't let somebody else do it for you. And make sure it's the mindset, it's the sec, the psychology, the ability to get along together, the sparks that fly in creative magic, as opposed to anything on a resume, including an mba, but lots of other things. Just build your team very, very carefully with the right people. Really, really hard to do, but it pays back the time that you spend on it.

[Keith (Host)]

You know, I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, so we always talk about technology and product. It's, it is the tidal wave of conversation. But I do hear more and more people talking about creating that right culture and creating that right team. So maybe, maybe there's a, you know, silver lining in this, but I think it all, it all works to benefit, you know, building the company the right way.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Yeah. You know, there's an interesting trend now in the Valley, since you mentioned it, which is the, they call it the fte, the Forward Deployed engineer. That's an innovation. It's an organizational innovation. And it means that you hire somebody can go into the customer, be like the customer, right? Becomes part of the customer's team instead of the firm's team, solves the problem with their perspective in mind and their environment in mind and their, their people in mind, and really helps adoption. They may never come back to your company and they love it so much in the place they're deployed that that's where that becomes their home. But that's a really nice innovation by Silicon Valley, I think. And I wouldn't call it the Forward deployed engineer, but it's the customer's partner. And I applaud that. I think that's a good indication that Silicon Valley is thinking about the customer more than ever before.

[Keith (Host)]

Well, that's a good, a good point is Eddie. I guess to, to drop it. Hunter, were you a positive notes for the, the Valley in the future? And another good reason to go out and pick up venture mode, escape the administration trap by finding and unleashing entrepreneurial leaders. It's, that's a gem. Thanks for contributing that and for joining us here on Liftoff. Hunter, any, Any final, Any final, Final?

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

No, no. I'd love people to buy the book and love to get comments. So you can find the book adventuremode biz biz and you can find [e-mail] I'd love for you to get in touch.

[Keith (Host)]

Thank you so much for your time and your sharing.

[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

Good Keith. Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.

[Keith (Host)]

Pleasure.

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[Keith (Host)]

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[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

We are downloadable. We are streamable.

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[Hunter Hastings (Guest)]

That's all.

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