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Today, one of Denver's fastest-growing companies Sympoz—the company behind online crafting community Craftsy— stands at over 200 employees and multiple tens of millions in revenue. The trick to their growth, co-founder and COO Josh Scott said, has been keeping their core leadership team focused and collaborative while scaling.
“It’s a very different business than it was when there were four of us co-founders in 2009,” Scott said.
“The first inflection point of hyper-growth is the most difficult,” co-founder and CEO John Levisay said. “The stage of going from 30 people to hiring 60 more was tough because there were more new people than people to train them. People have to go the extra mile to on-board the new people. It would be easy for a company to break at that point.”
But the company didn’t break. Since Sympoz created Craftsy in 2011 (thanks to the advice of Levisay’s mom, an avid quilter who saw more potential in online craft instruction than lessons in wine-tasting and economics) it has raised more than $35 million and now offers classes in 16 categories, ranging from cake decorating to woodworking.
Before the success of Craftsy, Sympoz was a four-person operation hatched by Scott, Levisay, CTO Todd Tobin and VP of Engineering Bret Hanna while they were working at ServiceMagic.
“We really felt like the promise of online education was largely being unfulfilled,” Levisay said. “We wanted to build a platform that mitigates geographic and time constraints.”
Since Tobin and Hanna were both engineers, the four co-founders worked on building the platform. Once Sympoz was in the hopper, the team realized they needed something none of them knew anything about: content. So they brought Emily Lawrence on board in 2010 to head up the production of content and video; she is today the company's VP of Production.
As Sympoz hired, they quickly learned the importance of the right management style. Instead of relying on email and Yammer, the co-founders make the effort to leave their desks and walk over to discuss ideas with other people—a move that helps build up a communicative and friendly company culture. Today, this culture is still valued as Sympoz and Craftsy expand by hiring complementary employees.
“We spend a lot of time talking about the current team’s characteristics and how it can be complemented with even better people,” Scott said. “We’ve created profiles on different types of people we are looking for pretty explicitly - and we map each open position to one of those profiles. So that way we can constantly be out having conversations with potential candidates.”
By keeping focused on their hiring goals and their product, the four founders have found no problem in sticking together to expand upon their original idea. This teamwork all stems back to the fact that Tobin, Hanna, Scott and Levisay worked together before they even started the venture.
“The biggest thing is that we all worked together so there weren’t really surprises in that way,” Scott said. “We knew what we were getting into with each other. We know how we work together, so now the most complicated thing we do is giving the company what it needs from us.”
