The Art Of Letting Go: 7 Things Growth-Stage Venture-Backed Founders Let Go For Growth

In our recent podcast with Pinhome founders Dayu Dara Permata and Ahmed Aljunied , Dara brought up that one of the things she had learned (or more precisely, unlearned) over the course of building Pinhome into Indonesia’s largest full-stack, end-to-end property transaction platform is “the art of letting go.”

And this “art of letting go” as a key learning or un-learning reflects a broader pattern we have picked up from the sharings of founders and founding team leaders as their businesses mature and organizations become more complex.?

In this article, we lay out similar sharings from founders across our podcast, and identify what exactly founders have to let go of in order to grow, leading to some ideas and practices that run counterintuitive to prevailing startup wisdom or notions of what hypergrowth looks like for a venture-backed startup. And this counterintuitive nature of the learnings from growth-stage founders is what makes this discussion of “letting go” all the more compelling.

We enclose a TLDR list below but you can read the full article here.

(1) Letting go of emotions with set processes and systems and a data-driven approach.

(2) Letting go of opportunities with relentless prioritization, disciplined resource allocation, and having a strong team and pool of supporters aligned and bought in on their singular mission that has remained unchanged.

(3) Letting go of the work from product efficiency in the early-stage as the company tries to unlock market value to capital efficiency as the company begins to rake in cash (both from the business and investors) and has to regulate and optimize its use for the growth of the businessLetting go of maximizing headcount size by leveraging technology as expressed as much into the organizational structure as it is in the customer experience.

(4) Letting go of maximizing headcount size by leveraging technology as expressed as much into the organizational structure as it is in the customer experience.

(5) Letting go of impatience as the company becomes more complex as an organization and there is more at stake for the business.

(6) Letting go of market assumptions / presumptions about how to operate was crucial in unlocking the “blessing in disguise” that having a distributed team accustomed to operating efficiently remotely brought to the picture.?

(7) Letting go of habits and biases by allowing leadership styles to be disrupted and leveraging technology to fill inefficiency gaps.?