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The Cadence, visualised

I came across former Paypal/Yammer founder David Sacks philosophy/framework called The Cadence which aims to create a compounding effect for growth for SaaS startups.

David’s 13 minute blog post and 20 slides deck describes The Cadence in detail and so I thought to distill this down to create a visual interpretation made available as prints so that it could easily be hung on any aspiring founder’s wall.

“Ironically, the better a startup is doing, the more chaos there is. This is one of the few startup problems that growth doesn’t solve — in fact, it’s caused by growth”

– David Sacks

The Cadence is based on a few key insights:

First, the 4 major functions in a SaaS startup; Sales, Finance, Product, and Marketing, are all best run on a quarterly cycle.

However, it’s not the same cycle. Sales and Finance are on one calendar; Product and Marketing are on another calendar offset by about a month.

If you snap these two calendars together, it will create a single operating cadence for the company.

The key milestones and events in these systems create opportunities for company-wide communication and collaboration, a kind of superstructure for the organization.