Lindsey Witmer Collins is Founder and CEO of WLCM.AI, an Inc. 5000 company building AI solutions for enterprises, and Scribbly Books.
I have lived and breathed Silicon Valley for my entire career. I’ve helped more than 100 startups go to market, often with software that went on to win awards from Apple, Fast Company, the Webbys and others. Designing and building great software is what my agency does, and I’ve made a point of positioning us not as prospectors rushing for gold but as the people selling the pans the risk-takers need. That’s how you build an Inc. 5000 company in a town full of moonshots—you make sure the moonshots have something good to fly.
I’ve also invested in and built companies of my own. Those have always been creatively enriching, always a chance to practice my craft and sometimes financially successful. I say “sometimes” with my eyes open. I’ve watched—and participated in—the life-death-life cycle of startups for too many years to be anything other than clear-eyed about the odds.
So when people ask me what makes a startup succeed, I have an answer I didn’t expect to have when I started.
The Things I Assumed Would Decide It
For most of my career, I believed success rested on the strength of the idea and the quality of the execution. It’s a natural belief for a builder. If the solution is real and the software is excellent, the rest should follow.
The uncomfortable reality is that on the projects I’ve worked on, those two ingredients were essentially guaranteed. Nobody comes to us with a bad idea and a small budget. The founders were sharp, the problem was real, the product was well made. And yet the outcomes ranged from acquisitions to shutdowns, with everything in between. If idea and execution were the deciding factors, the distribution wouldn’t look like that.
Founder capability matters enormously, of course—the capacity to make decisions under uncertainty, to sell before there’s anything to sell and to keep going. Strategy matters, too: who you go after first, what you refuse to build, when you raise and how much. But I’ve seen brilliant founders with sound strategy and beautiful software stall out, and I’ve seen more ordinary combinations of those three take off. Something else was at play.
What Was Actually In The Room
The startups that made it had a network around them that was doing real work. Not a list of LinkedIn connections, but an active field of people who were provisioning them, protecting them and connecting them.
Provision looks like the first 10 customers who came from a former colleague’s introduction, or the advisor who extended runway with a bridge check when a round slipped. Protection is less visible, and I think it’s underrated. It’s the board member who talks a founder out of a fatal hire, the peer who’s been through a down round and picks up the phone at 11 p.m. and the lawyer who’s a friend and reads the term sheet twice. Connection is the compounding part. One introduction leads to a partnership, which leads to a distribution channel, which leads to the acquirer who’d been watching for a year.
When I look back at the companies that lasted, this force was already present before the product shipped. Sometimes the founders had built it deliberately over a decade. Sometimes they’d inherited it from a previous exit or a well-connected co-founder. Occasionally they were just unusually good at asking for help and making people glad they’d given it. However it got there, the network didn’t merely improve the odds. It changed what kind of game the startup was playing.
What This Means If You’re Building
I don’t say this to discourage anyone who’s starting without that kind of field around them. I say it because it’s the ingredient least talked about and most within reach, and because founders often treat network-building as something they’ll build later. In my experience, that’s backwards. Early on, the product benefits from the network far more than the network benefits from the product.
A few things I now tell founders early: Recruit your protectors before you need them; the people who will tell you the truth are hardest to find once you’re in trouble. Give your network a specific job. “We need three design partners in logistics” is something a friend can act on, while “let me know if you hear of anything” is not. And spend real time being useful to other people’s companies, because the field you’re building is reciprocal or it isn’t a field at all.
None of this replaces a strong solution, a capable founder or a sound strategy. Those still have to be there. But after 100 launches, I’ve come to believe they’re the entry fee. The network around the company is what decides whether it gets to stay in the game long enough to win it.
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