These companies pioneered a new style of “bottom-up” growth, where individual contributors seeded a product’s adoption within a customer company.

Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows.

Instead, teams are often better to focus on basics, like figuring out the right target market, and creating the initial product features. You need to nail the killer product, and prove that you can gain an atomic network, before reaching for the financial lever.