The Biggest Threat for a Growing Company

A company is as good as the people behind it. Hence I feel that the biggest threat any growing business faces is that of Talent Acquisition & Retention. Getting smart people to join who are a good fit for the business is a must to drive growth. This is one factor which I feel is not highlighted enough and where a lot of large startups also fail.

Why even the best fail at this?

Google is the World’s most valuable company (as on May 12,2016). That being said, even the startup has not been very successful in retaining talent as well as acquiring the smartest guys lately.  Most of the new products at Google have been acquired and not developed in house. And the interesting thing here is that a lot of ex-Googlers have developed these products. A few examples of these would be Youtube, Doubleclick, Android, Blogger etc.

I believe to deal with this, one needs to understand answer the following questions:

- What is the culture of the company I am trying to build?

- To build that, what type of people do I need to recruit? Also how do I assess whether my existing workforce is maintaining and growing the culture?

- Is the culture I envision there in my company? If not, where are we going wrong?

Google has always been known to be a very innovative company with a focus on rolling out innovative and scalable solutions for customer problems. Google has been known to hire the best engineering talent. However to build scalable solutions, the business side of these solutions is where I feel the gap exists. To maintain or further enhance its growth, Google must address this gap and look at insourcing a lot of the innovative products it intends to offer its users in the future.