How to Build a Antifragile Company

Three Principles to Reinforce Your Company

Insight from Christa Quarles

Tech companies face many issues. That's part of the game!

Leaders will hyperfocus on growth and product building when push comes to shove.

This focus will cause the back office teams (HR, finance, compliance) to decay.

When left unmonitored, this chaos leads to operation breakdowns, communication fails (shoutout Carta!), and employees with wandering eyes.

Christa Quarles, the CEO of OpenTable, has a unique way of looking at these problems.

Her life experiences, including growing up in a big family, being married to a former Navy Seal, and quickly moving up from CFO to CEO at OpenTable, have given her a strong ability to spot and tackle key moments in a company’s growth.

Quarles shared three main strategies with Firstround to help companies stay strong during times of change:

1. Be Reactive and Flexible: Quarles advises against setting strict rules and processes too early. Instead, she suggests a more responsive way of doing things. She suggests changes should happen as problems come up. This method is about finding the right balance – not too much rigidity, but not a total lack of it either. It involves paying attention to small problems and learning from them, rather than waiting for bigger issues to happen.

2. Turn Challenges into Opportunities for Growth: Quarles emphasizes that facing challenges is not just normal, but necessary for a company to grow. Instead of being scared of these challenges, companies should set up ways to spot, understand, and solve them. This way of thinking turns potential problems into opportunities to improve and prepares the company for future challenges.

3. Finders vs Fixers: Quarles highlights that the people who find problems in a company aren’t usually the ones best suited to fix them. She observes that people in big-picture roles, like in finance, HR, or as the CEO, are good at spotting issues. But, the real solutions should come from the directly involved teams. This approach includes continuous checking, making small changes, and adjusting things as needed to solve problems effectively.