Carilu Dietrich

Hypergrowth companies compress what takes others 5–10 years into months. That means you need to keep hiring leaders who've already seen the next stage of growth — because it'll arrive before you're ready.

My 10-point checklist for evaluating a hypergrowth company: Rule of 40, investor quality, NPS/customer satisfaction, net dollar retention, growth rate, burn rate, market position (Gartner/Forrester rank), and Glassdoor score.

Atlassian spent 2–3x more on R&D than comparable companies — and almost nothing on sales prospecting. They took all the money they would've spent on sales and plowed it into product. That ratio held even after IPO.

Net dollar retention of 180% means a company nearly doubles revenue from existing customers alone — without a single new customer. Snowflake hit this. That's the benchmark for a truly healthy business.

Bundling kills product-led growth. At Atlassian, every time we bundled products for the land, it slowed down conversions. Land with one product, get to value in 7 days, then expand. Bundles are for sales-led motions, not PLG.

The biggest growth levers — moving upmarket, going global, adding a partner channel — can't be owned by one department. If it's only a marketing goal or only a sales goal, it won't work. These are company strategy problems.