Achieving growth and success as a startup founder is a long-game. While you may be doing a victory lap after achieving seed or series funding early on in your career as a founder, it can start to actually get lonely as your company achieves growth and enters a more mature stage of operability.
How do you map out a capital strategy at later stages of growth, where you have more avenues of funding available—and likely more stakeholders influencing your business trajectory?
Giving successful founders access to the resources they need to navigate this later phase of startup life and continue the march toward unicorn status is exactly what Kristjan Sigurdson, PHD and the team at Endeavor Canada are on a mission to do.
Founded in 1997, Endeavor is a global organization with a mission to unlock the transformational power of entrepreneurship by selecting, supporting, and investing in the world’s top founders. Today, Endeavor’s network spans 40+ locations and supports 2,300+ entrepreneurs, whose companies generate combined revenues of over $28 billion, have created more than 3.9 million jobs, and, in 2020, raised over $4 billion in capital.
As Managing Director of Endeavor Canada, Kristjan connects growth-stage entrepreneurs with resources, mentorship, and networks to scale their businesses and transform their communities.
But he’s been working hard to drive Canadian innovation in numerous roles for more than a decade, including helping scale the Creative Destruction Lab into one of the world’s largest startup support organizations, while also completing a PhD in Strategic Management from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
He’s got an amazing background and has been a stellar resource to founders across Canada and beyond, and we pick his brain on what it takes to drive innovation, achieve growth and scale in 2024.
Harnessing the Multiplier Effect
Schools like Stanford, MIT and many other US-based institutions have unmatched local networks of intellectual and economic support, with a density of talent, experience and judgement that simply can’t be accessed in lower-profile academic settings.
Kristjan’s mission in life and at Endeavor Canada is to help “spread the wealth,” so to speak, and help the great ideas and amazing founders who have what it takes to build the next Canadian unicorn with their own superstar network of growth resources.
The concept of the Multiplier Effect can’t be underestimated. Having large, successful companies within your ecosystem can be critical when successful founders turn their massive exits and liquidity events into opportunities to “lift all ships in their harbor,” so to speak.
Look no further than Shopify as a local example of a unicorn that continues to help other Canadian enterprises achieve success, or how the city of Seattle has punched high in establishing itself as a hotbed for global tech.
Stream the full conversation with Kristjan on Boast’s What The Tech YouTube channel here.
