Suggestions
Jennifer Gazza
Entrepreneur and CEO of Buffer
Jennifer Gazza is a successful entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of the social media management platform Buffer. She has a diverse educational background, having studied human relations at Carnegie Institute, and pursuing master's degrees in engineering at the University of Warwick-WMG. Gazza is an avid surfer, skier, and mountain biker who values living life on her own terms. Additionally, she is an active supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.
With her expertise in business and leadership, Gazza has overseen the growth of Buffer's successful platform, which helps businesses optimize their social media presence. She demonstrates the importance of following one's passions and carving out a unique path in life.
Highlights
If I were to rebrand Founder Mode, I would suggest Back To Basics Mode or First Principles Mode.
What strikes me about Founder Mode is that what it's really about, is cutting through the cruft of process and structure in a company, and getting back to the core of what made it exist in the first place.
When you go all the way to first principles, you go to the founding of the company. That's why Founders are so well suited to pull off this shift of priorities and reorganizing of a company. When you reflect on the founding of a company, you realize that there are only a few things that really made it take off in the first place:
• Building a great product • Getting the word out there • Taking care of customers
That is, for me, what I would boil down the business to. That's all we focused on at Buffer in the first few years. Down to the fact that the first few roles were engineers, designers, content marketers and customer support folks. The fact that we truly had focus on those things and not much else, is why we gained traction and grew rapidly.
Over time, as a company grows, you have to add structure and processes just in order to manage a larger group of humans in service of the vision and goals. And with more people, management becomes a meaningful aspect of many peoples' roles. The structure and processes can sometimes get in the way of what really matters in making a business successful.
And when you end up with more structure and process than you need for the stage you are at, it can truly become debilitating. That's why part of Founder Mode has been flattening the organization and the Founder really getting back into the details.
That's where I'd add a fourth item to the list:
• Designing a great company
At a certain size, you need to be intentional about how the company is designed and structured to achieve great outcomes.
When I reflect on the last few years, I've gone through my own version of Founder Mode. But I'd describe it as Back To Basics Mode or First Principles Mode.
This shift hasn't been about me; it's been about us as an organization reminding ourselves of how we made something out of nothing in the first place. And really getting to work on building a great product, getting the word out there about it, and taking care of our customers.
We recently crossed $19M in ARR at Buffer… for the second time.
It's been a journey, to say the least. We first crossed $19M in ARR in September 2018. It's hard to believe that's six years ago.
The chart tells the story well - it's been a rollercoaster and the hardest thing I've worked through as a Founder CEO. There's a lot of pain represented in that curve. To be declining for multiple years is demoralizing and exhausting. But I always planned to build a long-term business and was determined to lead us back to thriving, so I remained optimistic despite the fact it took some searching to find the path to new growth.
In many ways, this is a failure for me as CEO and for us as a business. It truly is. I fully own that as a fact.
And yet, I see it as a success too. We plateaued, declined, and rediscovered growth as a business in those years. I grew significantly as a leader, and we'll soon cross 14 years since I started the company. We went through this cycle without doing layoffs, thanks to the fact we entered our decline with profitability and a healthy cash balance.
Most importantly, we figured out what we are for as a business; who we're serving. For me, that involved reminding myself why I even started Buffer. I love building for and serving entrepreneurs, and I love helping creators and small businesses get off the ground and thrive.We re-committed to the business model that serves these folks, and drove our early growth, which is a highly generous freemium SaaS offering. I get a kick out of delivering immense value compared to what we charge for the product, and challenging myself to continually improve our tools.
Through the low lows of our multi-year decline, we rediscovered our DNA and the vital components of our culture. We found a way to blend that with what the world and our space looks like today, to arrive at a strategy and way of working that's helping us thrive again and ensure we can exist for another decade and beyond. I found a new level of passion and conviction for what we're doing, for the potential we have as a business, and the ways I can lead and do work that fuels me to help us fulfill those ambitions.
The first time we crossed $19M, the writing was on the wall for our looming decline. Pace of product improvement and innovation had stalled; we were debilitated by tech debt we didn't yet know how to manage. We succumbed to squeezing revenue out of existing customers, and were already seeing a steep decline in new paying customers.
This time around, we are moving faster and more boldly than we have in years, and we've re-centered ourselves around growing by serving more customers and continually adding real value, rather than through price increases and short-term growth hacks.
There's no doubt we will run into challenging cycles again in our future. I'm confident we'll find our way through those too. To me, that's a natural part of building a long-term business.
Onwards to $20M, again.
