Mastering sustainable growth to build resilient startups that thrive
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“Nobody wants to get rich slowly.”
Legendary investor Warren Buffett is reported to have said the above line during a conversation with Jeff Bezos. Buffett’s investment strategies were simple and effective, but few others followed them. The reason? Impatience. Founders chased short-term gains even at the cost of sacrificing the foundational elements needed for long-term success.
This reluctance to embrace long-term thinking also resonates in the tech world, where the obsession with hyper-growth has dominated startup culture for decades. But rising interest rates and escalating operational costs have pushed founders to reconsider the way they build and scale. The era of reckless growth at any cost has given way to an age of resilience, efficiency, and sustainability.
In this episode of The Effortless Podcast, Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder and CEO of DevRev, and Amit Prakash, Co-Founder and CTO of ThoughtSpot, delve into the art of building startups for the long haul. They share hard-earned lessons on sustainable startup success—strategic hiring, distributed teams, extensible platforms, and scaling with conviction.
From hyper-growth to sustainable strategies: a necessary shift
Every entrepreneur worth their salt is thinking about building companies differently. Maybe a bit slower growth, but more sustainable. And stretching the dollar is an important piece of the puzzle, having a longer runway.
The transition from a near-zero interest rate environment to one where rates hover around 5% has been a game-changer. For years, cheap capital fueled an unsustainable growth-at-all-costs mentality. Founders were incentivized to hire aggressively, expand rapidly, and prioritize market share over profitability. But with borrowing costs on the rise, startups can no longer afford such reckless strategies.
At the same time, operational costs in traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley have skyrocketed. Founders are now forced to grapple with the realities of rising rents, higher salaries, and fierce competition for talent. As a result, the focus has shifted from hyper-growth to sustainable growth—a mindset that prioritizes efficiency, adaptability, and long-term value creation.
Startups now face a stark reality: success is no longer measured by how quickly you grow, but by how effectively you can stretch every dollar. As Prakash explains, startups must adopt a “moneyball” approach to resource allocation: “In some ways, you’re playing that moneyball game of how do you find the highest leverage with your dollar.”
The pressure to deliver immediate results can be overwhelming, particularly in a market that rewards quick wins. But as Buffett’s quote reminds us, the allure of instant gratification often leads to poor decision-making.
Key strategies for sustainable growth:
1. Focus on resilience over speed: Dheeraj stresses the importance of slowing down to build a strong foundation. This means prioritizing deliberate, intentional decisions over reactive, short-sighted ones.
2. Adopt platform thinking: Building extensible platforms that can evolve with your business is another key to sustainability. We’ll see Dheeraj elaborating on this idea in later sections, emphasizing the importance of designing mechanisms that enable flexibility and scalability.
3. Invest in untapped talent pools: Amit encourages founders to look beyond the usual suspects when sourcing talent. “The leverage comes from not going after talent that everybody is going after and is already too established, but finding it in a form that is not quite ready for everyone to get value out of that talent,” he explains. This approach not only saves money but also fosters diversity and innovation.
Bridging the gap: aligning distributed teams with company goals
In a world where remote work has become the norm, building distributed teams is no longer optional—it’s essential. But as Dheeraj points out, it’s not enough to simply hire people in different locations.
One of the biggest challenges of managing distributed teams is ensuring that everyone is aligned on context and culture. Without a shared understanding of the company’s goals, values, and priorities, remote teams can quickly become disconnected from the larger organization. This is why Dheeraj emphasizes the importance of investing in context-building from the very beginning.
Prakash adds that proximity often plays a role in how information is shared and decisions are made. “When somebody is sitting a few thousand miles away from you, there’s already that confirmation bias that they’re not part of the mothership,” he explains. Overcoming this bias requires deliberate effort, including regular communication, clear documentation, and intentional relationship-building.
At the heart of any successful distributed team is the right leader—someone who can bridge the gap between product and people. Dheeraj terms such leaders as being in the Goldilocks zone—someone who brings product and people thinking early on, obsesses over design, and enjoys talking to customers.
Many product managers are actually programme managers or project managers. But if you can get a design lover to become your product person…Find a design lover because you can never go wrong. They might not appreciate APIs too much, they might not appreciate architecture of the back end too much. But if they bring their design thinking and want to do business and want to talk to customers, I think you probably have found your person in that Goldilocks zone.
Creating a culture of belonging in distributed teams
The statement “Nobody wants to get rich slowly” doesn’t just apply to financial aspirations but also reflects the impatience that pervades today’s professional landscape. When instant gratification takes precedence, the temptation to jump from one job to another becomes irresistable.
Many employees, especially younger professionals, are lured by the promise of quick financial gains or the allure of a more glamorous title. However, this pattern of job-hopping can sometimes lead to a shortsighted approach to career growth.
Amit delved into the implications of this behavior, emphasizing how it affects both employees and employers. This transactional mindset, where job decisions are based primarily on incremental salary increases, often overlooks the broader benefits of staying in an environment that fosters learning, mentorship, and personal growth.
Jumping from one role to another might yield short-term rewards, but it can hinder the development of essential skills, particularly those that come with navigating challenges, building relationships, and contributing to long-term projects.
What I’ve seen over the years is that a lot of people will change jobs for a 10% raise. And they don’t realize that the biggest risk they’re taking is that in the long run, they may not develop the depth and breadth of skills that they would have if they had stayed longer in one place.
Appreciation, or the lack thereof, is a critical factor in determining whether employees feel valued and motivated to stay. Dheeraj highlighted the need for organizations to address this gap by creating an environment where employees feel acknowledged and supported. “We haven’t learned to figure out appreciation,” he admits. “When we’ve hired so fast, what it means to really, you know, appreciate people and figure out how to give them regular feedback.”
Dheeraj further explored how this mentality influences organizational culture, especially in fast-paced startups. The constant churn of talent can leave both managers and employees grappling with a lack of continuity. Overcoming this sense of alienation requires deliberate effort from the employer’s end to ensure all employees, regardless of location, feel equally valued.
For a lot of young talent, I think they also feel like, “Is this good enough?” Are they doing well enough? Is this the place where there’ll be appreciation? And it’s not just about dollars and cents. It’s also the dopamines, the endorphins, the serotonins…anything that really gives you positive ions to say that, look, I belong here and at the same time, this is the place where I want to go build my career.
Key strategies to nurture a healthy culture:
- One effective approach is fostering a “writing culture,” where ideas and decisions are documented and shared asynchronously. “All the ideas are actually in documents that anyone can read anywhere,” Amit noted, highlighting how this practice democratizes information and fosters clarity.
- Another is organizing rituals and events that brings employees together. Amit cited ThoughtSpot’s hackathons as an example, which provided an opportunity for senior leaders to spend time with employees, ideate on new ideas, and build connections.
Scaling smartly: cracking new markets with conviction
Scaling is often seen as the ultimate marker of a startup’s success. But as Dheeraj and Amit reveal, the process of scaling is as much about strategy as it is about growth. “Conviction plays a big role,” Dheeraj asserts. For founders, scaling isn’t just about hiring more people or opening new offices—it’s about making deliberate, thoughtful decisions that set the stage for long-term success.
When DevRev decided to establish an office in Slovenia, Dheeraj didn’t have an extensive network or a clear roadmap. “In Slovenia, we didn’t know anybody. We knew somebody who knew someone,” he recalls. But what he did have was conviction—a belief that Slovenia’s talent pool and startup culture aligned with his company’s long-term goals. “If I have to crack the code of Slovenia, I will have to crack the code of Slovenia,” he explains.
Scaling is not just about expanding—it’s about doing so in a way that aligns with your company’s values and vision. Dheeraj picked Slovenia given its conducive environment for startups and the willingness of the talent pool to trade cash for equity. “We wanted people who were long-term greedy,” he notes. “We wanted to get to a place where people also give the company a chance for 2, 3, 4, 5 years.”
This long-term thinking principle applies not just to individual employees but to entire organizations. Startups that scale mindfully, prioritizing quality over quantity, are better equipped to weather economic challenges and achieve sustainable growth.
Platform-centric development: stretching the dollar efficiently
For startups operating in a resource-constrained environment, the ability to do more with less is not just a competitive advantage—it’s a necessity. And one of the most effective ways to achieve this is through platform-centric thinking.
Platforms, by design, create scalability and extensibility. Instead of committing significant resources to individual features or bespoke customer solutions, startups can invest in building robust, flexible systems that evolve over time. As Dheeraj explains, "Part of stretching the dollar is to build a platform that is fairly committed and stable, and not having to be re-architected every time.”
In a startup environment, the temptation to prioritize features over foundational architecture is strong. Sales teams often clamor for specific functionalities to close deals, while customers push for quick fixes to meet their unique needs. But this short-term thinking can lead to a bloated, unsustainable product. “If you didn’t have a marketplace thinking and App Store thinking and extensibility thinking and robust APIs, you will constantly have to go back to the platform and build the mechanisms,” Dheeraj warns.
Prakash expands on this idea, highlighting the cyclical nature of discovery and delivery in product development. “You need to build more to discover more. In order to build, you need to discover what you need to build.” This delicate balance between exploration and execution underscores the importance of building platforms that can adapt to evolving requirements without constant re-architecture.
One of the most effective ways to stretch the dollar is to design platforms that support incremental adoption. As Dheeraj notes, “APIs help you miniaturize consumption. Webhooks help you miniaturize consumption.” By enabling customers and internal teams to consume small, discrete pieces of functionality, startups can reduce development costs, accelerate iteration cycles, and increase flexibility.
Wrapping up: building for the long haul
Building for the long haul isn’t just a strategy—it’s a mindset, a philosophy that defines how founders approach every decision. In a world where startups often chase rapid growth and quick wins, the ability to think long-term has become a rare and valuable trait.
At its core, building for the long haul means trading the allure of immediate gratification for the enduring rewards of resilience and sustainability. It’s about making deliberate choices—whether that’s designing extensible platforms, fostering cultures of co-creation, or investing in distributed teams—to create a foundation that can weather both market volatility and competitive pressures. The conversation between Dheeraj and Amit in this episode of The Effortless Podcast highlights that while this approach requires patience and conviction, the payoff is transformative.
Also, building for the long haul is not about avoiding risks—it’s about taking the right ones. It’s about investing in ideas, teams, and systems that will stand the test of time. As Dheeraj and Amit demonstrate throughout their conversation, embracing resilience, adaptability, and long-term thinking is the way forward for startups to lay the groundwork for sustained success.
If you’re inspired by these insights and want to dive deeper into the art of building startups for the future, don’t miss the valuable insights on The Effortless Podcast Substack. Explore more stories, strategies, and lessons from some of the sharpest minds in tech. Because building for the long haul starts with learning from those who’ve mastered it.
