Knowing whether your opponents are coached by Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, or Urban Meyer is helpful when joining a football league. Scouting, practice, and game plans must all be adequately modified.
Developing a winning strategy and culture at a company is similar. To succeed, you must understand your competition and optimize your recruiting, strategy, and operations playbooks.
In this first episode of The GTMfund Podcast, we have a man who is an expert in developing winning playbooks, cultures, and strategies that put his competition on the back foot.
Mark Cranney is an enterprise go-to-market operator and three-time unicorn creator. Most recently, he was the COO at Skydio. He’s also a founding operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and has been involved in the acquisitions of Opsware and Aster Data Systems by HP and Teradata, respectively.
What You’ll Learn
- How to create a winning culture
- How to keep your competition at bay
- How to hire talent that culturally fits your organization
Episode Highlights
(02:25) Introducing Mark Cranney
(03:48) Two books that shaped Mark’s winning culture
(10:39) How to keep your competition at bay
(14:10) Three questions to ask when scouting for culture-fit talent
(15:46) How to keep recruited talent motivated
(16:16) “Process triumphs heroics.” How Mark created and used playbooks to create winning cultures
(23:00) Why you need to get more granular in your competitive strategy
(35:17) How to create a winning culture without turning your team’s culture toxic.
(37:18) “If it’s not a competitive environment, for me, that’s toxic.”
(39:09) Mark’s parting advice
Quotes
The winning general knows the outcome before the battle even starts.
You got to go where you can win, particularly when you don’t have a lot of arrows in your quiver. You’ve got to make sure you’re spending time in the right places, from a segmentation and targeting standpoint, until you build up the muscle where you can expand into other scenarios.
If it’s not a competitive environment, for me, that’s toxic.
If you have eight hours to chop down a tree, are you going to spend eight hours hacking away with a dull axe? Or are you going to spend seven of them sharpening the blade and an hour chopping the tree down?
If you take a shortcut, there’s always a consequence—and it’s usually not a good one.
Links & Resources
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things, a book by Ben Horowitz
- What You Do Is Who You Are, a book by Ben Horowitz
The GTM Podcast
Don’t miss The .GTM Podcast dropping every Tuesday, discussing true stories and experiences including trials and tribulations in the Go-To-Market world.
And…monthly bonus podcast episodes dropping the first Thursday of every month.
