Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 07:56 am

On February 22, 2021 Reforge raised a $20 million Series A, led by Andreesen Horowitz. It was a big win. A huge milestone after 4 years.

Six weeks later on a Friday afternoon, I clicked Zoom’s “End Meeting” button and completed my last day at the startup.

I am a founding member of the team, and there hasn’t been much time to reflect on the journey until now. I wanted to share lessons learned in getting an early-stage company to its Series A, from someone who didn’t know what a Series A was when he started.

In this post I’ll explain:

What is Reforge and where it fits in the online education ecosystem
Why you should join an early-stage company
Lessons learned over the last 4 years

What is Reforge and where does it fit in the online education ecosystem?

Reforge is an online education platform for mid-career technology professionals who want to do great work and keep leveling up their careers. We started with growth marketing and expanded from there.

We’re solving the need for career development in that gap between entry-level roles (college or boot camps) and executive roles (networking and executive coaching).

We raised our Series A just as online education was picking up heat. Shortly after we announced:

Google announced 3 new certificate programs in data analytics, UX design, and project management
Coursera IPO’ed and closed their first day of trading at $45/share ($5.9 billion market cap)
OnDeck raised $20 million in Series A funding

I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship between Reforge’s raise and Google’s double-down in online education… but I’m not saying you can rule it out either.

None of this was in my purview when I joined Reforge in May of 2017. At the time, I didn’t know what venture capital was. I didn’t understand the tech ecosystem, company valuations, and the difference between multiples of EBITA vs. ARR.

I knew two things:

Reforge content was excellent. The material covered in the flagship program, Growth Series, was incredible. From a depth of knowledge perspective, I hadn’t seen anything like it (and still haven’t).

Graduate and MBA programs were broken. People were coming out of these programs with more student debt and fewer career prospects. Yet graduate education was still positioned as a viable means to “get ahead” in your career and in life.

When I joined this bootstrapped company, led by Brian Balfour, there were so many unknowns: how big was the market for this type of education? Then assuming the TAM was big enough, how do you scale up programs to meet the needs of the market?

We got to work answering those questions.

A year in and we were a team of 9 with annual revenue of low-7 figures.

6 months later, we were a team of 5 and mid-7 figures.

Today, the company is +40 people, 8-figure revenue, and well-funded. I’m super bullish about the future of Reforge.

Why should you work at an early-stage company

There are lots of reasons to work at an early-stage company, but I’ll cover the four most salient to me:

You learn how to learn about customers
You wear multiple hats
You work on hard problems
Hard work is grossly underrated

I’ll also cover a variety of lessons learned during my time at Reforge.

You learn how to learn about customers

The later the stage, the clearer the customer: urban middle-high income professionals (Uber), SMBs (HubSpot), Gen-Z to late-millennial men (Robinhood).

But at the early stage, you’re pre-Product-Market fit. You don’t know if you’ve created something people want. You’re not entirely sure what you created.

What is Reforge? More specifically, what is it in the customer’s mind? Is Reforge a course? Is it a community? A signal, like a blue checkmark for LinkedIn? I spent a lot of the first year defining and refining the answer: meeting and talking to customers, both informally (coffees/drinks) and formally (customer research calls).

Flexing your customer empathy muscles is a transferable skill you’ll take with you for the rest of your career. The place to build those muscles is at an early-stage company.

Specific lessons learned about customer research:

Problems, not solutions. You want to understand their problem, not what they think the solution is. People are terrific at sharing their pains and less skilled at solutioning (faster horse and all that).

Map your questions to a use case. The use case is: what is the problem the customer is solving? Why is it a problem? When does the problem come up and how often? What are alternatives to solving the problem?

Great structure produces great research. Like doing a heavy back squat, 80% of customer research work is solved by sound structure. Structure the interview the right way (right questions, right sequence, resurfaced to the right people) and anyone can be great at customer research.

You wear multiple hats

One of my Reforge colleagues was surprised I was leaving. “Why now? they asked, especially with the raise?”

I pointed them to the open roles on our career page. “I’m a generalist. Right now, we need specialists.”

When I joined in ‘17, being a generalist was advantageous, for both the employees and the company. Our team of 5 were all generalists to varying degrees. Except for eng and design, I got to wear all the hats: content creation, content operations, customer support, program operations, marketing, product. At the time, I called this doing my job.

Being a generalist at an early-stage company was the best education into tech I could have asked for, from both a macro and micro perspective. I got to see how each function works with the others. I got a crisper understanding of the customer because I worked with them on so many surfaces. I built up an intimate knowledge of all the nooks and crannies of each role, nuances no one volunteers in a JD.

Specific lessons learned about being a generalist:

Get good enough to be dangerous. At an early-stage company, you need to be able to send emails at a specific time, wrangle Squarespace’s WYSIWYG website, and modify existing SQL queries. Breadth and proficiency is the goal, not deep expertise.

Speed is your best weapon. Make. every. second. count. A generalist who can’t haul ass is just a poor specialist. At a strategic level, “slow is fast” is the right mantra. But slow is a luxury early-stage generalists can’t afford. Fast is fast.

You’ll hit a local maximum. There’s a shelf life for generalists. For me at Reforge, this was 4 years. Then to reach the stage of growth, the company needs deep expertise in all its functions. This can happen imperceptibly slowly, but it does happen. To continue your career progression, you need to start to specialize as well.

You work on hard problems

Scott Galloways says strategy comes down to answering one question:

“What can we do that’s really fucking hard?”

At an early-stage start-up, that’s everything. All your problems are existential ones, you solve or you die. So you learn to focus on one problem at a time, turn blinders on for everything else, then repeat ad nauseum.

Examples of our first-year problems:

What program do we build next?
How do we know people will buy?
How do we acquire enough customers across two programs?
How do we position the two programs against each other?
How do we run two programs at the same time?
How do we improve the value proposition of Reforge beyond content?

When you focus on the hard problems at an early-stage company, you get an honest scorecard on your abilities. Unlike working at a larger organization, there’s total visibility on what you produce. There’s no place to hide. You’re on the hook for your work, which forces you to do better work.

Specific hard problems we focused on and solved to varying degrees:

How do we scale up program creation? Our first iteration was Brian and me working together on a program. The second iteration came from a hypothesis that we needed a very specific profile. We honed in on that profile, then experimented with different pods supporting that role in the content creation process. All subsequent iterations have been different permutations of that pod.
How do we acquire new customers? We tried all the things: blogging, a news aggregation product, email marketing, Facebook ads, LinkedIn video, etc. After 3 years, we discovered the most effective lever was: build and launch new programs.
How do we remove the Brian bottleneck? In the first year, Brian did everything: program creation, event hosting, application review, even scheduling for our special guests. Program creation we unlocked by cracking the profile for the role (see above). We launched a series of experiments testing different event formats until we landed on our Executives-in-Residence program. And with duct tape and Google Sheets, we spun up an application process that distributed application review across a wider team and removed Brian from the process completely. (He still schedules our special guests, though.)

Hard work is grossly underrated

When people talk about Brian, they talk about how smart he is, how strategic, how he’s got that good hair, etc. What rarely comes up: his work ethic.

During cohorts, he’d lead the morning event, do some content creation, call our BoA rep who won’t release our funds, prep a case study, then Uber to SoMa so he could lead the second event. Then he’d go home and do it all again the next day.

Why doesn’t this come up more often?

I think because hard work is (still) grossly underrated. This is especially true in the world of tech and its climate of $50K signing bonuses, Gensler-inspired offices, and mini-fridges stocked with that good-flavored Chobani yogurt. Tech folks are soft.

Tangent: Hollywood gets a bad rap but entertainment folks work harder than their tech counterparts. In entertainment you kill what you eat, it doesn’t just show up on a corporate Divvy card.

Back to Reforge and the specific lesson learned: over the life of your career, there are so many factors completely outside of your control. You have no influence on macro trends, macroeconomics, which companies get funded and which don’t.

Putting in the work is the only thing directly in your purview: the hours you apply and the quality of those hours. At larger companies, this gets obfuscated by politics and org charts, but at early-stage companies, hard work gives you leverage.

“What is moral fiber?”

Zara Zhang (PMM at Bytedance, former GSV Ventures) summed up her experience working in China:

Although it feels like you are scrambling and hustling from meeting to meeting every day without end, the learning and growing are also happening at a rapid pace.

The equivalent can be said about working at an early- vs late-stage company (and doesn’t require moving to China).

Rapid learning and increased leverage do come at a cost. You should be prepared for all the tradeoffs that come with working at an early-stage company:

Loosely applied job tiles
Imbalances of power, work, compensation
Lack of structure on how career progression might work

It’s all true. The question is: is it worth it to you?

Four roles before Reforge, the title on my LinkedIn profile read “Waiter” (shoutout Natalee Thai Culver City). Fast-forward to today: my next role is in growth product.

Working early-stage at Reforge allowed me to make a career jump that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

The juice was worth the squeeze.[efn_note]Feature image (and this reference) from The Girl Next Door (2004). I love this speech Emile Hirsch’s character gave at his scholarship awards night dinner. He lost the scholarship, won the girl. In doing so, he launched his own start-up, a video production company that created progressive, comprehensive sex education resources. HuffPo has a terrific oral history of the movie you can find here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-girl-next-door_n_5143633[/efn_note]

Articles about lessons learned from previous jobs:

Footnotes:

Should You Join An Early Stage Startup? Lessons Learned At Reforge