Business 101: Forget the Hype, Focus on Value and Profit

Why chasing hype kills companies and how founders build durable value and profit instead — short video breakdown.

What this video covers

Fred Voccola's journey of scaling and selling companies, including navigating a pivot from $45M revenue to a $150M sale and ultimately building a multibillion-dollar business. It also touches on acquisition strategies and thriving during financial crises.

Transcript

from an experience perspective because there's a lot of people now, you know, listening that maybe they haven't experienced those different cycles. What What was the biggest lesson as an operator when you go through one of those cycles? So, the dot-com era, we were web hosting company. And web hosting in the mid to late in the late '90s was the sexiest stuff in the world. Internet applications were brand new. I mean, they didn't really exist. Uh this was It was a crazy time. We raised hundreds of millions of dollars. We built data centers. It sounds, you know, like today people are building data centers. We built data centers back in the '90s. And we were so irresponsible financially. As was the whole industry. So, we literally burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Our recurring revenue, we were over 50, 60 million dollars of recurring revenue in a couple of years, which was

great. But we didn't even look at things like customer acquisition cost. We didn't think about capital Okay. Lesson I learned was the financial professionals do not have all the answers. They're not the smartest people in the room. They are trend followers. They are not creating value. Raise more money, spend more money, unlimited money, raise it, grow, grow, grow. What the right answer was was for us to slow down to grow 70 or 80% instead of 300% and generate cash and not take on every dot-com in the world that was a customer who weren't financially viable. I mean, it was such a good lesson in business 101, which is revenue, profits, expense management. Forget hype, focus on value for customers, and focus on a sustainable business.

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•By Alejandro Cremades