Nine lessons in nine years of Branch

Nine years ago today Alex Austin , Mike Molinet ?? , Dmitri Gaskin , and I decided to say goodbye to photobooks and get started on what has been the most epic adventure I have been on to date - building Branch. As I reflect on these past nine years, I wanted to share nine lessons that come to mind:

1. Who you go on a journey with matters more than anything in the early stages. There was a moment in those early days of product-market fit search hell that I considered leaving - what kept me was knowing that Alex, Mike, and Dmitri were the best people I have ever worked with. I knew that even if we failed, I was going to grow and evolve more than I ever had in the past.
2. Product-market fit is pure magic when you have it.?After three failed startup attempts, building something that people really wanted and needed and seeing the impact our products had on mobile brands was incredible. This drove us through so many of those sleepless work nights and weekends in the early days.
3. Scaling yourself is harder than scaling the company.?The hardest thing in my Branch career was admitting that I am not always scaling at the same pace as the company or the team, which meant sometimes I needed to work on myself and other times I needed to step back and let others who were more experienced take the lead. I always say that ego is the toughest startup monster a founder faces, and if you can fight your own ego while staying confident, your path to success is so much easier.
4. Culture focus from day one matters.?We were so busy in those early days that I remember having to force my co-founders to get in a room to decide on who we wanted to be early on and our values and it really paid off and helped us have a very intentional and cohesive culture. This helped us weather many storms over the years.?
5. Grit is the most important quality in a founder. No matter what industry you are in, there will be ups and downs environment and market changes. If you can look at obstacles and changes as opportunities to get ahead faster than your competition and keep a positive outlook, you can weather any storm.
6. How you spend your time can have a huge impact on the team. It’s so easy to focus on being reactive and fixing the small problems. If you don’t spend the time on the proactive, big picture problems, you will be left behind. Carving out time to think big can be hard, but with a good EA and strong leadership, it’s the most important thing you can do. External places where you meet other founders can also be good catalysts for thinking big so taking the time a couple of times a year to do these can be transformational.
7. Hiring strong leaders is hard but worth it. I feel as we grew in the early days it was hard to focus on hiring the right leadership and I struggled to lead my team. I see many founders (I was one of them) with 8-10 direct reports, managing junior people, etc. The sooner you can hire an experienced leadership team, the better. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with Paula Mantle , Dan Ahmadi , Alex Bauer , and now Christian Ashlock who have truly made me look forward to going to work every day and made our marketing team so much better.
8. Humility and collaboration truly make a difference. One of our early values was humility. While this one can be hard to maintain, it’s probably the value that led us to parting ways with the most people who did not live the value and one that helped us maintain our culture and have people join, stay, and many times even come back to Branch.
9. Ultimately, building a company is all about the people. While you need product-market fit and amazing products, you can’t build that without being able to hire, motivate, and build an environment where people thrive. When I interviewed 40 employees a while back asking them what makes Branch special, the answer always came to people - working with people that helped them grow, making a difference for our customers.?

So a BIG THANK YOU to all the amazing current and past employees that have shown so much passion, humility, grit to help Branch get to where we are today!