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Balfour: Diversifying growth channels early is a bad investor mindset

Brian Balfour · Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023 · at 28:16

Brian Balfour, founder of Reforge and former VP of Growth at HubSpot, criticizes early channel diversification as a bad investor mindset that ignores operational complexity.

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“Once you figure out kind of that core, that thing that's working, it's almost always in a venture scale company, the better thing to do Is to focus your firepower, your limited attention, your limited capital, your limited talent on fueling that thing as fast as possible, which is very counter to the, like a lot of the common advice, which is like, ooh, you don't want to be too reliant on one thing. You want to diversify, like all of that kind of stuff. That is a bad investor's point of view, right? Like, yes, that might work for money management, right? It does not work For growing a business because it ignores all of the complexity that comes with diversification of products or channels”

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