This episode, the Founder of Trajectify Mike Krupit talks about the lesson’s he’s learned while participating in the growth of 8 tech companies over the last 25 years. He shares why some of his companies failed while others succeeded, the importance of a company’s core values, and what makes a successful tech startup.
Mike Krupit has participated in growing eight companies over 25 years in the Northeast and West Coast.
Mike grew from CTO to COO to CEO, while learning a lot about business, leadership, strategy, organization, and operations.
Mike’s been involved in extraordinary growth, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and even bankruptcies.
Today, he is the leader and Founder at Trajectify, providing interim executive and other strategic services to growth-stage companies. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow:
- What e-commerce businesses were like during the dot com bubble.
- Why CEOs need to be able to delegate.
- The importance of having clear core values in a company.
- Different limits tech entrepreneurs have.
- The benefits of working in the same industry throughout your career.
- The qualities a startup Founder needs to be successful.
- Why a successful company needs a leader.
Resources:
- Trajectify
- E10: The Team that Stuck Together through a Corporate Collapse, an Acquisition, and the Creation of a New Firm
- The Mom Test
- Curotec
Connect with Mike Krupit:
Connecting with the host:
- Brian Dainis on Linktree
Quotables
- 10:31 – “The music industry was super corrupt and probably still is but they were doing all sorts of trickery on their numbers and we couldn’t do that because everything we did was transparent and just in time so we couldn’t play the game the same way the traditional music commerce companies could meaning we had to make money on every transaction and margins in music were super slim.”
- 18:55 – “The people who worked there probably nearly 30 years later are still really well connected and still work together and the reason is it was the first company I worked for that had identified its value system, its core values, and strictly hired people in alignment with those core values.”
- 42:41 – “Those are the Founders that create successful companies, there’s a passion there that must exist to keep an early team together long enough to build the traction you need to know that you’re on a path to success. So I had mastered the art of delegation, I knew how to built a team and I went right into CEO mode and I didn’t make anyone nuts and I probably should have.”
- 43:52 – “Zuckerburg and the metaverse, Elon Musk and all that’s going now, these people are irrational and passionate. Bill Gates not only Bill Gates and building Microsoft but Bill Gates and what he’s doing now with all his wealth and genetic modification of food and buying up farms all over the world. Noble causes but he’s operating in what I see as an irrationally passionate way but these guys all have successes unparalleled with the rest of us.”
- 45:14 – “While not everybody whose irrationally passionate is going to succeed the absence of that irrational passion hinders the ability of a young tech company to get to that next level.”
- 50:07 – “You can’t just put a few engineers in a room and say bam magic happens if you’re going to build it into a business and a business that’s ultimately scaleable and sustainable you’ve got to start with leadership.”
