GTM 62: The Revenue Viking Shares his Competitive Edge & Winning Culture Tactics with Mark Cranney (Revisited Bonus Episode)

Mark Cranney is an enterprise go-to-market operator and three-time unicorn creator. Most recently, he was the COO at Skydio. He's also a founding operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and has been involved in the acquisitions of Opsware and Aster Data Systems by HP and Teradata, respectively. Mark specializes in developing winning playbooks, cultures, and strategies that put his competition on the back foot. What You'll Learn  How to create a winning culture  How to keep your competition at bay How to hire talent that culturally fits your organization Episode Highlights (03:48) The books that shaped Mark's winning culture (10:39) How to keep your competition at bay (14:10) Three questions to ask when scouting for culture-fit talent (15:46) How to keep recruited talent motivated (16:16) "Process triumphs heroics." How Mark created and used playbooks to create  winning cultures (23:00) Why you need to get more granular in your competitive strategy (35:17) How to create a winning culture without turning your team's culture toxic.(37:18) "If it's not a competitive environment, for me, that's toxic." (39:09) Mark's parting advice Quotes "The winning general knows the outcome before the battle even starts." "You got to go where you can win, particularly when you don't have a lot of arrows in your quiver. You've got to make sure you're spending time in the right places, from a segmentation and targeting standpoint, until you build up the muscle where you can expand into other scenarios." "If it's not a competitive environment, for me, that's toxic." "If you have eight hours to chop down a tree, are you going to spend eight hours hacking away with a dull axe? Or are you going to spend seven of them sharpening the blade and an hour chopping the tree down?" "If you take a shortcut, there's always a consequence—and it's usually not a good one." Links & Resources Mark Cranney's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcranney/ The Hard Thing About Hard Things, a book by Ben Horowitz What You Do Is Who You Are, a book by Ben Horowitz The GTM Podcast Don’t miss The GTM Podcast dropping every Tuesday discussing true stories and experiences including trials and tribulations in the Go-To-Market world. And…monthly bonus podcast episodes dropping the first Thursday of every month.