Bob Tinker turned the tables on me, and he can do it for you. As co-founder and CEO, he took MobileIron, a leader in mobile security solutions for the enterprise, from cocktail napkin to IPO and—from 2009 to 2013—the world’s fastest-growing tech company according to Deloitte. By the time Bob hired me as his coach, MobileIron was in choppy water. It was easy to facilitate Bob’s learning process: He’s gifted at learning. He’s now also a star teacher, having co-authored a pair of books titled Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup. Rare examples of a startup CEO candidly sharing the precious fruit of arduous experience, the books are not merely insightful—they’re useful. They compare to the exemplar of the genre, Ben Horowitz’s superbThe Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Book One, The Company Journey, is aimed narrowly at founders of startups serving enterprise clients. The big idea is what Bob calls Go To Market Fit. In the universe of VC-funded companies, the notion of product-market fit is as basic and familiar as the Ten Commandments. Go To Market Fit is what needs to happen next, after your product is proven to satisfy customer needs, and is driving up-and-to-the-right growth. How do you build a playbook to transform marketing and sales from artisanal activities into a machine producing reliably repeatable results? Bob knows, and in The Company Journey, he tells.
Book Two, Change or Be Changed, deserves a vastly broader audience. Focused on the challenge of leading a successful company through the stages of growth—what I’d call leading through change—this volume is intensely personal. The essential message: A leader’s ability to drive change depends on unlearning. “I was letting my fear of self-inflicted short-term turbulence get in the way of doing the right thing,” says Tinker. “It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill the company. It’s just going to suck for a while. Getting through that fear is the breakthrough.”
If you’d like to hear Bob’s straight talk about his experience, I highly recommend his episode of the From Founder to CEO podcast.