Some people have an unusual ability to look at a business, get beneath the symptoms, and see what’s really going on. Seksom Suriyapa is one of those people. In this second interview in our ongoing Enduring GROWTH System™ Research Program, Lisa Hartley and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Seksom to explore a deceptively difficult question:
What really enables a company to keep growing?
Seksom brings an unusual vantage point to that question.
Over his career, he’s helped operate, evaluate, acquire and invest in dozens of high-growth technology companies. As head of the M&A team, he was part of SuccessFactors as it grew from roughly $100M to $350M before its acquisition by SAP, and stayed through its next chapter of growth, reaching close to $1B in revenue before his departure. He went on to lead corporate and business development at Akamai, later headed Corporate Development & Strategy at Twitter, and spent nearly four years as a General Partner at Upfront Ventures. Today, he’s working at the intersection of AI, product and business transformation as Chief Transformation Officer at Nextiva.
I’ve also had the benefit of knowing Seksom for years.
We worked together at SuccessFactors, where we spent time looking at potential acquisitions — evaluating some, walking away from others, and pursuing the ones we believed could create real value, including the Jobs2Web acquisition, which fundamentally changed the trajectory of SuccessFactors’ recruiting solution at the time.
Over those years, I came to trust something beyond Seksom’s experience: I came to trust the way he thinks.
He’s become one of my go-to people when I’m trying to diagnose a difficult growth or scale question because he has a knack for looking past the obvious answer. Our research conversation was no exception. Here are the top ideas that have stayed with me.
1. Stay close enough to the customer to see what’s coming next.
Seksom talked about understanding the customer’s job to be done and looking for what he called “broken windows” — the awkward things people do because they don’t yet have a good way to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.
Those broken windows are signals and the best companies notice them. Then they find the simplest, most elegant way to solve the underlying problem, get that solution into customers’ hands, see whether it becomes genuinely useful, and keep improving it.
This is where Seksom’s perspective on acquisition became particularly interesting. He has spent a meaningful part of his career evaluating and executing acquisitions. And yet he’s skeptical of acquisition as a primary path to growth.
Why?
Because companies that repeatedly create organic growth are demonstrating something incredibly valuable: they remain close enough to their customers and markets to discover what needs to come next — and capable enough to build it. Sometimes acquisition is absolutely the right answer. But repeated reliance on it can also mask something that’s missing inside the company: customer intimacy, market insight, product capability or the ability to move fast enough.
Coming from someone with Seksom’s M&A experience, that observation landed with us.
2. When growth isn’t working, don’t make assumptions — diagnose backward before you scale forward.
One of the most common executive reactions to stalled growth is to add more execution.
- Hire more salespeople.
- Change the sales leader.
- Spend more on marketing.
- Push harder.
Seksom challenged the assumption underneath that response.
His definition of product-market fit is wonderfully simple:
“The minute you feel the market pulling versus you’re pushing.”
When the market starts pulling the product from you rather than you having to push it into the market, something fundamental has changed. And once that begins to happen, another test emerges:
Can someone other than the founder sell it? Can a salesperson ramp and successfully sell the product without the CEO or another executive being involved in every deal?
That’s evidence that something is becoming repeatable.
But if sales aren’t happening, Seksom’s warning was equally simple: Don’t automatically assume you have a sales problem.
- You may have a demand problem.
- Or a value problem.
- Or a product problem.
- Or you may simply not have solved an important enough customer problem yet.
Adding more sales capacity to something the market isn’t pulling yet doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It scales the wrong thing.
3. Know your superpower — and be brutally honest about it.
As companies grow, Seksom believes leaders need to understand what their organization is exceptionally good at.
- Product?
- Selling?
- Brand?
- Something else?
At SuccessFactors, one of the company’s superpowers was selling. That mattered strategically because it meant Seksom and his team could put additional products into the hands of an extraordinarily capable sales organization and create leverage from them.
But knowing your superpower requires something many organizations struggle with: the ability to tell yourself the truth. Seksom talked about being ruthless in understanding both strengths and weaknesses. He also made the case for bringing in outside perspectives because outsiders are sometimes willing to point out the “ugly baby” everyone inside the company has learned not to see or mention.
Growth strategy shouldn’t be built around the company you wish you were. It should exploit what you’re uniquely capable of doing — while being clear-eyed about what you’re not.
4. Be prepared for the answer to change — and be willing to adapt.
This may have been the thread connecting everything else Seksom said.
- Markets run out of room.
- Customer behavior changes.
- New substitutes emerge that don’t look anything like the competitors you’re watching.
- Technology changes what’s possible.
- And AI is now compressing product cycles, planning cycles and even the relationship between people and scale.
Seksom believes adaptability is becoming a real premium.
Companies need to put ideas into the market sooner, learn faster, shorten the distance between planning and evidence, and continually reassess what they believe. Because enduring growth isn’t about discovering a growth formula and scaling it forever. It’s about building the capability to repeatedly discover what should work next.
Lisa and I agree that this may be our biggest takeaway from our conversation with Seksom.
- Stay close enough to the customer to see what’s changing.
- Be honest enough to recognize what it means.
- Know your strengths well enough to understand how you can respond.
- And build an organization adaptable enough to do something about it.
The companies that endure aren’t simply better at executing today’s growth model. They’re better at anticipating and adapting to tomorrow’s.
A sincere thank you to Seksom Suriyapa for sitting down with us, sharing his experience, challenging our thinking, and contributing his expertise to the Enduring GROWTH System™ Research Program. There was a lot to unpack in this conversation. And that’s exactly why we asked him to join us. His insights are helping shape our understanding of what it really takes to build companies that don’t just grow — but endure.
To learn more from Seksom, connect with him on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/seksom-suriyapa-92048b/.
To learn more about the Enduring GROWTH System™, visit our Services page.