Inc. Magazine – September 2019

That’s the formula CEO Todd Olson followed to drive

Pendo, the cloud-based software platform he co-founded in

2013, to $20.9 million in sales in just five years. Olson learned

it from a VC who told him that category leaders—the kinds

of companies that go public—triple revenue in the first two

years after hitting $1 million, and then double it in each of

the next three. “I can tell you that second triple was incred-

ibly challenging,” says Olson, who pulled it off by restructur-

ing Pendo’s team and rethinking his product marketing.

Now Olson, a serial entrepreneur with two prior com-

panies under his belt—one failed, one acquired—has landed

Pendo on the 2019 Inc. 500. It debuts at No. 73, with 4,

percent three-year growth, and Olson wants to keep coming

back. “People ask me, as CEO, what do you lose sleep over?”

he says. “Growing slow.”

Inc.’s annual ranking of the country’s 500 fastest-growing

private companies is like one of those cameras that capture

light in motion. The 2019 class, which represents some of the

most dynamic sectors of the economy, has in the past three

years attained a median growth rate of 1,701.4 percent. In

service to society’s most cherished metric, it has created

52,000 jobs.

So, all these businesses have achieved. Yet most have not

fully arrived. The Inc. 500 is not a list of America’s biggest

or most profitable companies. Rather, it is a list of the most

promising. The excitement lies in seeing what they will do

next. Some will mature into large, public enterprises. Some

will transform industries. Some will march steadily forward,

improving the lives of ever more customers and employees.

Their laurels are for wearing in celebration, not resting on.

One thing the large majority will do is keep

growing. Just 9 percent of CEOs on the larger

Inc. 5000 list report themselves content with

the status quo. Eighty percent are still pound-

ing away after larger and larger top lines, even

as their expanding size makes large percentage

gains harder. They are exploring multiple

routes to growth, with the majority favoring

the new—either customers (46 percent) or

products (19 percent)—over more of the same.

It’s not that all these CEOs crave momentum

to bust their way to lucrative exits. Historically,

more than half of Inc. 500 companies remain in

private hands four to 10 years after making the

list, according to research con ducted by the

Kauffman Foundation in 2012. Even in this

frenetic IPO year, with the likes of Beyond Meat,

Slack, and Uber making headlines by going

public, the percentage of honorees who see

themselves hurtling toward those same markets

is low—just 4 percent for the Inc. 5000 overall.

Still, the recent run of high-profile startup

IPOs—as well as ongoing robust M&A activity—

creates a kind of contact high, as founders men-

tally map their paths to billion-dollar revenue.

Olson calls going public a “very promising”

option if both Pendo and the markets continue their current

performance. But, like many Inc. 500 CEOs, he dismisses

talk of exit strategies as a distraction from what matters:

how the company will exploit fresh opportunities tomorrow

and next week and next year. Pendo is pursuing three new

growth engines: European expansion (the company, based in

Raleigh, North Carolina, just opened a London office); more

enterprise sales, which translate to larger deals; and a prod-

uct targeting a fresh market. “The way we continue growing,

even as the numbers get bigger,” says Olson, “is never getting

comfortable or complacent with where we are.”

T

o relentlessly focus on the future, Inc.

500 founders must first envision it. Chris

Spanos, for example, foresees an era

when robotic cars delivering pizza on

Super Bowl Sunday will run off the road,

and drones bearing packages fall from

the sky. As transportation relies more on

software and less on humans, Spanos’s

company, Urgently (No. 12; 11,633 percent), will be there to

address inevitable glitches—whether that means rescuing

driverless vehicles from flower beds or retrieving dropped

Amazon orders and speeding them on their way. For now, the

$30.3 million company, based in Vienna, Virginia, orchestrates

more traditional roadside assistance to flesh-and-blood

drivers through an app, integrating with services from com-

panies like BMW, Volvo, and Uber. Automakers including

Porsche and Jaguar are among its investors.

Urgently’s continued growth depends on new partners,