The Unreasonable Focus on Speed and Focus
The venture capital panelists agreed that the earliest and most crucial signal for high-growth companies was an unreasonable amount of focus. Jethro Cohen cited Airwallex, which scaled to over a billion dollars in annual revenue by saying “no to a lot of things” and focusing strictly on two segments (online travel agents and e-commerce businesses) and one core product (foreign currency exchange).
Jackie Vullinghs emphasized that focus must be paired with speed. Companies like Canva maintained velocity, and even accelerated, by anchoring their entire product and marketing team around two “marquee events” each year, using these arbitrary deadlines to ensure a singular direction.
Bryan Wilmot noted that this external focus translates internally into a really simple customer proposition. He suggested the “barbecue litmus test”: the ability for a customer to explain what the company does in five seconds to a friend. He used Wise as an example of a company doing “explosive things” by simply making currency cheap and easy to move and spend overseas.
What Airwallex did in an unbelievable way was just say no to a lot of things. And they stuck very true to those two core principles of product focus and customer focus.
– Jethro Cohen, Principal, Squarepeg
The Enemy of Speed: Committees and Risk Aversion
The single biggest cultural obstacle to speed in large companies, according to Jethro Cohen, was decision-making by committee. In startups, founders often make calls or grant complete autonomy to a specific person, enabling faster shipping and experimentation velocity.
Wilmot added that the early success of companies like Stake was driven by an “existential anxiety” where every employee felt an incredible sense of ownership and accountability. The trick for large companies is retaining this sense, where staff “treat the dollars like they’re your own”.
Vullinghs added that big organizations must create incentives for people to take risks, even if there is a 70% chance of failure, because the potential payoff is huge. Cohen noted that some portfolio companies hired generalists exclusively to “tinker with experiments” and “find out what happens” with a constrained budget.
Where speed goes to die is committee decision-making. The benefit of the startup is that founders make the calls…
– Jethro Cohen, Principal, Squarepeg
New Roles, New Operating Systems
The panellists observed that high-growth companies are fundamentally changing their organizational charts to support velocity and automation.
Vullinghs highlighted the rise of roles like go-to-market engineer. She stated that everyone needs to be more technical, automating 70% to 80% of operations: from sales outreach and lead scanning to revenue operations where phone call insights are automatically fed to product and CRM.
Cohen added that startups prioritized hiring based on behavioral traits over experience, seeking “high agency, smart people with a sufficiently enough technical skillset” who could be pointed at problems to solve. Wilmot said startups build roles by identifying genuine business problems and then “latching on to these roles,” resulting in “funky titles” because they prioritized the required outcome over corporate structure.
You sort of start to generate the roles and the requirements by genuinely identifying either business problems or business needs or opportunities, and then you start to latch on these roles.
– Bryan Wilmot, Chief Customer Officer, Stake
The Final Growth Signal: Commerciality and Agency
The panel concluded by defining the behavioral mindset necessary for large organizations to adopt going into 2026:
- Retention over Growth: Jethro Cohen suggested that more companies would grow faster by focusing on retention, as growth is easy, but retention is hard.
- Commerciality: Bryan Wilmot argued that “the language of marketing is the language of the CFO,” and genuine commercial understanding drives better decisions, well-informed risks, and a clear link between tactics and outcomes.
- High Agency: Jackie Vullinghs concluded that organizations need “high agency people” who are self-taught, look for problems to solve outside their job description, operate fast, and push boundaries.