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🍄 Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.
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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

My quest to become the internet strongest—or heaviest snatching—startup founder hit a massive snag this week. In one session I managed to jack my neck up, and screw my knee in the one session. Right in the middle of a week of leave that was supposed to have my fresh and firing back in at work on Monday. I have been able to focus on a few things throughout the week though which I’ve enjoyed.

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙️

Mac Reddin - Co-founder and CEO at Commsor

Mac Reddin is the co-founder and CEO of Commsor, the platform helping companies turn their networks into growth engines. Backed by $50 million from Atomico, Felicis, Slack Fund, and SevenSevenSix, Commsor empowers businesses to harness the power of community with a fully remote team of 50+ worldwide.

Before Commsor, Mac built and sold The Chunk, a Minecraft gaming network, proving early on that community-led growth isn’t just a buzzword. He’s also bootstrapped and scaled other startups, supporting those that put community first.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve? Why this?

We're trying to solve the problem of sales outbound, but not in the traditional way. A lot of people are solving that right now with AI, data, and automation—better ways to do cold outbound. We're focused on finding the warm paths. We won’t find every possible way to get to a deal, but a lot of it is tied to warm intros, referrals, and leveraging existing networks.

When I talk to sales leaders, they all know warm intros and referrals are the best deals—they're more likely to take a meeting, close faster, spend more money, churn less. But very few revenue teams have an actual process or operationalized step to get more of them. It’s sort of like, “Hey, if we get a referral or an intro, of course, we’ll take it,” but it just happens when it happens.

I had a call recently where someone described it well: we're not pitching a new channel or asking companies to build a community or partnerships. Instead, we’re helping them find value in something they already have—their network of investors, advisors, and customers. This is probably the most underutilized channel at most companies.

What was the most difficult when going from zero to one?

I think I could spend an hour answering that one. For us, our journey has been very nonlinear. Every startup journey is nonlinear, but ours in particular. We started as a hackathon project with just me building it. Then we got swept into the VC craziness of 2021-2022, where if you had a pulse, money was being thrown at you. I blinked, and suddenly we were a Series A and then a Series B company—without really trying or necessarily justifying those raises.

Then the world around us changed. We kind of got to zero to one there, but it turned out we had pandemic market fit, not product market fit. So, we spent nine months pivoting the business to where we are now. In some ways, I feel like I’ve done zero to one three times now in this company alone, in three different ways. Each time gets a little easier, a little clearer, but it’s always challenging.

For me, the hardest part of zero to one is trusting the process. There’s no shortcut—it’s all hard work, and you just have to plow through it to figure it out. Sometimes you get lucky, and the idea works, and you get to one. Other times, it doesn’t work out, and you never get there. But that’s just the nature of it. The hardest part is accepting that you might not get to one.

What was the original product you were building?

Originally, the hackathon product was this really janky, no-code community marketplace called Commsponsor—where the name Commsor comes from. It was a marketplace to connect independent communities with companies for partnerships, sponsorships, and similar opportunities. For example, we worked with Microsoft when they wanted to do a hiring campaign for engineers. We helped them connect with a bunch of different independent engineering communities to get in front of them.

During the pandemic, the investment in online communities skyrocketed, and we rode that wave for a while. Now, we’ve pivoted to our current focus. A lot of the building blocks of what makes community-led growth work overlap with what makes our ‘go-to-network’ strategy work. The difference is that with the network approach, we’re looking at a company’s network more holistically, rather than just focusing on the parts traditionally defined as community. In some ways, ‘network’ and ‘community’ are interchangeable for what we’re doing now.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

We're a tiny team, so it changes a lot day to day. My main job is to keep the lights on, steer the ship, and make sure we're going in the right direction. I'd say about 50% of my job is making those big decisions—figuring out what we should do, why we should do it, and processing all the information from customers and the market to distill it into a strategic narrative and direction.

The other 50% is being like special forces—getting dropped into whatever part of the business needs help on any given day or week. So, it varies a lot. Honestly, with a team of 14 people, the CEO title doesn’t mean much.

At our peak, before we pivoted, we had 68 people, and that’s when the CEO role started to feel more distinct. But when you’re under 50 people, the ‘founder’ part of the title carries more weight in describing what the day-to-day looks like than the ‘CEO’ part.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

I think back to when we raised a bunch of money and suddenly became a Series B company. I found myself—without realizing it until later—stopping being myself as a leader and thinking, “Oh shit, I’m a Series B CEO now. I’ve got to read the books and take advice from other people.” Looking back, I think that made me a worse leader because I was trying to be the kind of leader that books and blogs say you should be, instead of figuring out what kind of leader I actually am and leaning into my natural strengths.

What is your North Star metric inside of your company and why?

I think there’s an obvious North Star for any business—building a successful company that’s profitable and sticks around for the long haul. That’s just the standard stuff every business has to do. For us, I think we actually have two North Stars: one is more general, and the other is a long-term goal that really guides how I think about building the business.

The first one isn’t measurable, but it’s about having fun with it. A lot of people have given us feedback that they can see it in our marketing and our team’s online presence—they can tell we’re genuinely having fun with what we’re doing. And sure, you can’t put a number on ‘vibe,’ but you can feel it. It works. So for us, it’s about always finding ways to inject fun into what we’re doing, internally and externally. If you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?

The second, more serious North Star for me, is building a $100 million ARR business with a team of 100 people or less. Whether we get there or not, who knows—there are so many factors involved. But the way it shows up in the day-to-day is through the mindset of efficiency. You see these stories about companies with 6,000 engineers, and you just think, 'Why?’ We’re not trying to build just any company; we’re trying to build an efficient one. And now, more than ever, I think it’s possible to do that.

How do you set goals?

Our goals are pretty much just at the team level. We sit down, we discuss, and we agree on goals. Like I said, we’re 13 or 14 people—we don’t need a super robust goal system yet. A goal just kind of permeates throughout the org pretty easily.

For me, I think about it in a sort of goals, objectives, tactics way. Like, here’s the goal—cool, we want to add X million ARR next year. Okay, what are the things that have to be true for that goal to be possible? And then, what are the actual tactical things we can do to make those things true? It’s not quite as structured as something like an OKR process. Honestly, I think overly structuring goals when you’re sub-50 people can be more detrimental than helpful.

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How do you build culture?

This is always one of those loaded questions because culture is as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do—and how you do it. We’re a fully remote team, and I’ve worked remotely for 13 years, so I’ve never really worked in an office for more than a few months here and there. People often ask, “How do you do that? It’s not possible.” But honestly, if you hire good people who work hard and know the person next to them is working just as hard, and you inject some fun into it, the culture kind of comes naturally.

It shows, too. Whenever we’ve done team offsites or get-togethers, people who’ve only worked together remotely for 8-9 months can meet in person and, within an hour, it feels like they’ve been best friends for 10 years.

So for us, it’s about working hard, playing hard, and creating a culture where people are motivated and enjoy what they do. It’s less about formal policies and more about hiring the right people and creating an environment where they thrive.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire All-Star talent?

Our approach is to hire intentionally, not necessarily slowly. It’s not about dragging out the process, but rather taking our time to decide if we truly need the role. Once we know we need the hire, we move quickly to fill the gap. A lot of teams fall into the trap of hiring as a crutch to solve problems, instead of figuring out if the problem can be solved without adding another person.

Some of the best advice I’ve received about hiring boils down to two things. First, no matter how great your process is, you never truly know how a hire will work out until you’ve worked with them for three months. Even the best recruiters get it wrong 25% of the time. That’s why I lean into the 'hire fast, fire fast’ mindset.

Second, if it’s not a yes, it’s a no. Early on, I made the mistake of thinking, “We just need someone, so this person is good enough.” Every time I made a hire based on that reasoning, it turned out to be the wrong decision.

Do you have any specific channels that you use, job boards, head hunting communities?

At the stage we’re at right now, we rely heavily on our network and referrals. For example, for our last job posting, we basically just shared it on LinkedIn. And not even as a formal job post—I just made a personal post. Even with that, we got about 400 applicants in 24 hours, and it wasn’t a simple ‘click to apply’ setup. People had to go to a separate Typeform page and fill it out, so it required more effort.

I haven’t posted a job on a traditional job board in years. We have worked with a recruiter once in the past for an engineering role, but that’s been the exception. For go-to-market roles, it’s easier for us to leverage our network since that’s who we sell to and work with anyway. For more technical or specialized roles where we’re looking for deep, specific skills, we’ll consider recruiters. Overall, we’ve been able to rely on our network pretty effectively, which has streamlined our hiring process and helped us find great candidates.

What is one thing you really enjoy in your role?

I think one thing I really enjoy is leaning into weird marketing ideas. I’m a big fan of what I call ‘pattern break’ marketing. There’s this company called MSCHF, for example, that I love. They started by doing bizarre stunts, like putting an ATM in New York that displayed a leaderboard of who had the most money in their bank account after using it. Now they do all kinds of wild stuff, like making sneakers that get them sued by Crocs.

Most companies would benefit from intentionally putting 20-25% of their marketing budget and time into things they know they won’t be able to fully attribute. What ‘weird’ looks like depends on your audience and market, but the key is stepping away from boring, cookie-cutter campaigns. So many B2B companies think posting memes on LinkedIn counts as fun or interesting marketing, but it doesn’t. You can do better than that.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I’ve been a founder since I was 17, so for most of the last 14 years, I’ve been this self-described workaholic, going 150% all the time. But over the past year, I’ve started trying to do better—not necessarily putting myself before the business, but at least making myself equal to the business.

What works for me is taking small breaks throughout the day—like a 30-minute walk at lunch, making proper food, going for a run, or just turning my brain off for a bit. Even taking half a day on the weekend can help me reset. I’ve also noticed that longer breaks sometimes have a negative impact on how I feel about work-life balance. I’m just wired to keep moving. I’m not a founder because I want to be a billionaire or have my name in TechCrunch.

This time around, it turned into something that I think has the potential to be the next decade of work for me. But Commsor started as a 24-hour hackathon entry and just evolved from there. If the business fails tomorrow, I’ll just move on to the next thing. That’s how I get the best out of myself—by staying true to what drives me.

And that’s it! You can also find Mac on LinkedIn or check out Commsor in their website.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just caught a cool episode from The Startup Podcast talking about what we should expect in the coming years after Trump’s win. Chris and Yaniv discuss how Silicon Valley influencers played a role in this elections outcome and what a second term might mean for regulations affecting everything from crypto to AI.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳