Should a scaling company concentrate on a few priorities or pursue many opportunities in parallel?

Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

High performance is fundamentally focus: deciding exactly what must be gotten right and narrowing it to the smallest possible set of things, as an individual, team and company

There are too many things one can spend time on in the current world, so performance requires making the difficult decisions to concentrate all effort

8:53 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin

Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

Even with a grand everything-app vision, once you find the one thing that works you should cut everything else and stay narrow for years

Wolt cut all other categories once restaurant food delivery worked, in order to nail quick, consistent customer experience, efficiency and good unit economics

Scope: hard to sustain — requires repeatedly reminding people the broader vision is deferred, not abandoned

10:24 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

The biggest prioritization mistake sales leaders make is trying to do too much, which harms the leader personally and then cascades destructively to the team

Overextended leaders hit mindset and health problems, and they pass an ever-growing list downward without ever removing anything, so the team's load eventually bursts like an over-inflated balloon

6:07 20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

The main way companies fail as they scale is defocusing — launching new products and departments and adding layers of managers who all want to do something — and a founder must constantly fight the dark force pushing complexity

Every added manager and team leader brings their own ideas and initiatives, so complexity accretes unless actively resisted

49:02 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

Matt Pohlson · Jun 6, 2025

The biggest mistake early-stage founders make is trying to do too much; focus is the price of greatness

74:12 20VC: The Science of Storytelling: Three Steps to Master the Perfect Story | From Near Death Experience to Unicorn Startup: The Untold Story of Omaze with Matt Pohlson

Varun Mohan · Jun 2, 2025

Team size is not a function of output — ruthless focus on a single priority is the only thing that matters

It is far easier to run a company with one thing that matters than a company at the same revenue with five competing priorities; a large team not ruthlessly focused on one thing will be unsuccessful

Scope: framed as a change of mind about management; hard to execute because there are always shiny distractions

57:42 20VC: Windsurf Founder on Will Model Companies Own the App Layer | Why Moats Do Not Exist in a World of AI | Why the Notion of Single Person $BN Companies is BS | Lovable vs Bolt & Cursor vs Windsurf: How Does it All End with Varun Mohan

Johannes Reck · Jun 23, 2025

Going broad at Series A — new products, markets, customer and supply segments, plus senior hires to run them — is about the worst thing a company without proven management experience can do; it is better to stay narrow, go deep, and do less but better

When they followed the VCs' long-term vision they hired people wrong for the stage with no culture fit, growth slowed and expenses spiralled, forcing a 30% layoff and a refocus on the core

Scope: specific to Series A stage companies lacking management experience

32:02 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide

Johannes Reck · Jun 23, 2025

Founders overestimate their organisational capacity, so a company should keep a very tight strategy and obsessively focus on the core product rather than pursue many initiatives

Founders underestimate how much runway remains in improving and scaling the core product; doing ten sexy things means being mediocre at all of them

36:23 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Trying to do ten things at once means you will be excellent at three, adequate at three, and fail at four

Attention and execution capacity don't stretch across many simultaneous initiatives

0:00 20Growth: How Wix Built a $100M Marketing Machine | Why LTV is BS and Why Time Return On Investment is the Most Important Metric | How to 10x Your Growth: What is the Next Great Channel with Omer Shai, CMO @ Wix

Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

The test for whether to do more is whether a new effort can be parallelized without distracting the core work; if it distracts, it only makes sense if the upside justifies it

The core product experience that matters to users must not be affected by new bets

58:13 20VC: ElevenLabs Hits $200M ARR: The Untold Story of Europe's Fastest Growing AI Startup | The Real Cost of AI from Talent to Data Centres | How US VCs are in a Different League to Europeans | The Future of Foundation Models with Mati Staniszewski

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025

Having salespeople in different countries is not defocusing; the only defocusing version is letting them pull product resources for country-specific requests

One or two people selling somewhere when you're 10-20 people costs nothing in focus; if they sell you happily give resources, if not you tried

Scope: you must refuse country-specific product requests

42:17 20VC: Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation | Deel vs Rippling: WTF is Going On | Management Lessons from Ben Horowitz and Nik Storonsky | Deel's M&A Playbook: Lessons from 13 Acquisitions: What Works & What Doesn't

Ryan Petersen · Nov 13, 2023

When writing annual plans, each team's plan should be checked against the others so that finance, sales, and engineering plans visibly interlink, even if that requires writing the same thing twice

You need to check that finance, sales and tech plans actually support each other; that verification takes extra work but prevents misalignment

21:33 20VC: Flexport's Ryan Petersen: Reflections on Leadership from 13 Years Leading Flexport, Why Velocity not Speed is Most Important in Company Building, How Money Creates Inefficiencies in Scaling, The Future of Trade with China & Why Remote Work is so Cha

Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

Most work in a large organization is cross-functional, yet most organizations grow up with a functional mindset, so the CEO's job is to name a small number of company-level priorities that force sub-functions to optimize for the same outcome

Sales optimizes for the quarter, customer success for retention, product for launching — each optimizes its subsystem rather than the system; a shared priority like 'make the product easy, fast and unified' pulls marketing, sales and CS onto the same outcome

Scope: requires clarity on goals, duplicate work, timelines and accountability

16:21 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Harry Stebbings · Oct 2, 2023

Expanding 20VC's content beyond venture (e.g. booking pop stars) was a mistake and a loss of focus driven by chasing growth

That content isn't what the audience listens for or what the show is about; the lesson was to return to the core that makes them good

Scope: about his own show roughly a year prior

15:33 20VC: The Services Model of Venture Capital is Broken, The Best Founders Do Need Help, The Most Important Signals to Assess When Meeting Founders & Why Kids Bring Less Happiness and More Joy with Phin Barnes @ TheGP

Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

Discord's COVID-era branching out beyond gaming led down dead ends — people didn't resonate with those features — which is why they refocused on gaming this year

Over the few years following the expansion it became clear users weren't resonating with some of the features they had built

11:38 20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

The moat in global employment is much stronger than critics assume, and US entrants systematically underestimate the difficulty of Europe

Spinning up an entity and employing people on it is easy, but Germany and France require specific licenses, some countries cap mass terminations, firing someone in the Netherlands on a customer's behalf is extremely complex, and labor laws and taxes change weekly — startups exist that only do payroll in one country because it's that hard

25:46 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

Guillermo Rauch · Oct 6, 2023

A high quality bar is not the same as being slow — you can move fast by reducing the blast radius of experimentation and accumulating evidence before a broad launch

Confining experiments limits customer breakage while building overwhelming confidence, so speed and a high bar are compatible; Boeing bending wings past realistic limits is how you earn that confidence rather than merely marketing it

24:20 20VC: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To, Why Being First Does Not Matter & Why Market Over Traction or Team is the Most Important Thing with Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO @ Vercel

Jason Wilk · Apr 21, 2025

Dave's post-IPO expansion into crypto was a mistake; the company should have doubled down on the core product and AI from the outset of the IPO

There was still enormous room to run in the core business, and AI turned out to be the unlock for both cash-flow underwriting and customer support, whereas crypto was not core to improving the product for everyday Americans

Scope: retrospective judgment about the post-IPO period

26:07 20VC: Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders | The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time | Why SPACs Will Come Back | Why Short Sellers Should Be Banned | Is Trump Better for Business than Biden with Jason Wilk @ Dave

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

Continuing the GPT-Engineer open source community alongside Lovable was a mistake; they should have scrapped it and been 100% focused on the browser-based build product

From the perspective of maximal focus, doing things only tangentially related was a bad idea, and it wasn't needed for customer development; finding the single company bottleneck and solving it is the fastest way to move

Scope: Open source can be very useful for many other businesses

49:00 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

Fast-scaling sales teams break most often on prioritization, and secondarily on waiting — holding off on trying things until some condition changes.

Waiting for something to be different before testing something that could change the outcome is dangerous when you're scaling fast.

50:41 20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

Aatish Nayak · Apr 11, 2025

The first things to break in hypergrowth are prioritization clarity and decision ownership

By definition you get flooded with customers asking for many different things so nobody knows what direction to take, and you get a tragedy of the commons where broken things like product enablement of sales have no owner

20:42 20Product: How Scale AI and Harvey Build Product | Why PMs Are Wrong: They are not the CEOs of the Product | How to do Pre and Post Mortems Effectively and How to Nail PRDs | The Future of Product Management in a World of AI with Aatish Nayak

Guillermo Rauch · Oct 6, 2023

A company's quality is determined by how much it rejects over time — how many superficially attractive ideas it rules out.

0:00 20VC: Why Great Companies are Defined by How Many Things They Say No To, Why Being First Does Not Matter & Why Market Over Traction or Team is the Most Important Thing with Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO @ Vercel

Winston Weinberg · Jan 19, 2026

Learning to say no — blocking time and killing genuinely good ideas — is one of the hardest and most important disciplines as a founder scales; good product planning should hurt like a breakup

He used to stack endless P0s and try to do everything; discipline means every planning cycle must involve saying no to a couple of really good ideas

Scope: balanced against still being ambitious and doing more where possible; credits Brian Halligan for teaching him this

67:16 20VC: How Model Performance is Plateauing | Two Key Rules for Effective Deal-Making | Company Building Lessons from Keith Rabois, Brian Halligan and Pat Grady | Why Enterprise AI Adoption is Years Off with Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg

Alex Bouaziz · Oct 22, 2025

Deel's priority now is making its existing ~10 products work together as a seamless end-to-end HR and payroll experience rather than launching many new product bets

Having moved from two products to ten, the highest-value work is making the system work well together; new bets come only after dominating current markets as they did with global payroll and EOR

38:46 Integrate existing products fully before launching new bets

Alan Chang · Jan 5, 2026

No single product or strategy decision moved the needle most at Revolut — the answer was to do everything and pursue every opportunity

As the company grew they saw so many opportunities that pursuing all of them was the right response

38:01 Pursue every opportunity rather than one decisive bet

Alan Chang · Jan 5, 2026

There are not enough ambitious founders; instead of accepting a fixed number of work streams, founders should hire more great leaders so they can pursue more things in parallel

A company's throughput of parallel work streams is dictated by how many great leaders it has, so the expansionist move is to add leaders rather than play a zero-sum focus game

38:30 Great leader count not focus caps parallel workstreams

Phin Barnes · Oct 2, 2023 · hedged

20VC's expansion into 20 Sales, 20 Product and 20 Growth bolsters rather than dilutes the brand, because the defensible niche is the deep expert-interview style and community, not the venture topic itself

The core product is a particular way of going very deep with experts and building a community around them; applying it to adjacencies extends the same product rather than abandoning it

16:05 Defensible niche is the deep interview format not the topic so adjacent verticals extend not dilute the brand

Julio Vasconcellos · Sep 23, 2022

Peixe Urbano's sharp decline was caused by losing focus — expanding into too many product lines and geographies too fast, which consumed cash and, more importantly, management attention

When the daily deals market collapsed, the company had far more fronts to fight on and surface area to manage, making it much harder to get back to profitability

13:22 Expanding into too many product lines and geographies simultaneously caused collapse

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

Companies benefit enormously from doing everything at once but usually can't, so they should stay focused

16:30 Would benefit from doing everything but limited capacity forces focus

Sri Batchu · Jul 26, 2023

Simplification is a superpower for executives and is much harder than it looks: mediocre leaders faced with two high-impact initiatives do both, good ones pick one, and the best sometimes do neither because neither fits the strategy

Initiatives that don't fit the overall strategy are distracting, so saying no protects focus on what matters most

6:56 Great leaders say no to initiatives that dont fit strategy even if high impact

Max Junestrand · Aug 15, 2025

The most underrated founder skill in 2025 is correctly prioritizing when the opportunity set is enormous

With LLMs you could build almost anything, so distinguishing a real opportunity from a mere feature or from what everyone else is chasing is the decisive strength

71:53 Prioritization skill is decisive when llms make almost anything buildable

Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

A small team that has found product-market fit should not split itself to chase a second opportunity, however attractive

A 15-person team is already so small that halving it leaves neither effort with enough resources — 'you probably shouldn't split a raisin'

11:20 Team too small to split across two opportunities focus on one

Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

Discord's expansion beyond gaming into other verticals was worth doing despite disappointing business impact, because it introduced Discord to many people who still use it and taught him how to run a company at the next scale

It introduced Discord to a lot of people who continue to use it, the business grew tremendously in that period, and he learned a lot about managing at the next level

12:21 Off core expansion paid off through exposure and leadership learning despite weak direct business impact

Max Junestrand · Jan 26, 2026

Cutting from six or seven parallel products down to three done exceptionally well was the right product decision, because a tightly combined suite beats buying best-of-breed point tools separately

Building too many things with 12 engineers while he was out doing go-to-market produced a Frankenstein product; a user-friendly combination of agent, assistant, tabular review and Word add-in is better than buying each separately from point-solution competitors

38:16 Cut to three products done exceptionally well

Brad Lightcap · Apr 15, 2024

Leadership alignment on which few things matter is more important than those being the globally correct bets, because it is what lets a company maintain velocity at scale

If the team can align on the one-to-three priorities, he can translate them down to the organizations he builds; most companies inherently lose velocity as the perceived number of important things grows

10:15 Leadership alignment on priorities matters more than being globally correct

Brad Lightcap · Apr 15, 2024

Leadership should spend concentrated executive time on only the handful of things that are most important and delegate everything else.

Being aligned on what matters most lets the exec team dwell on one issue across multiple meetings while dozens of lesser decisions get made independently.

13:55 Concentrate exec time on few priorities delegate the rest

Des Traynor · Jul 18, 2022

Miro's success came from intense focused execution on perfecting online multiplayer whiteboarding rather than expanding into an Office-style suite, and from not letting newfound status distract them

Everyone tells you to become a multiplatform suite and expand your TAM, and press attention makes it tempting to announce metaverse, AR and hardware plans; Miro instead put all its time into the core product and withstood the FigJam threat

15:53 Resisting status driven suite expansion to focus on core product execution drove miros success

Emilie Choi · Aug 23, 2021

Coinbase should deliberately run a broad portfolio of products rather than follow the conventional 'focus, focus, focus' startup advice

The crypto total addressable market is massive and there is no dearth of opportunities, so intelligent large bets beat playing safe

27:21 Massive tam justifies a broad portfolio of intelligent bets over narrow focus