A founding principle of our Enduring GROWTH System™ Research Program is that we’re learning from people who have experienced company growth from very different vantage points.
This week’s interview took us (virtually) to Spain, where I had the pleasure of sitting down with Miguel Trujillo — a historian turned entrepreneur, investor and growth advisor — to explore what he’s learned from helping companies navigate growth from idea through exit. Our conversation led to an intriguing question:
What does a historian see when he looks at how companies grow?
Miguel brings an unusual perspective to that question.
He began his career in academia, earning a PhD in History before discovering entrepreneurship in his 30s. That led him to start his own company, complete an MBA, specialize in venture capital and eventually become COO of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN), working with early-stage investors across 27 countries.
Since then, he’s led an accelerator, worked in crowdfunding, become an angel investor himself and advised companies from idea stage through exit — helping leaders think through strategy, traction, scaling, capital and M&A.
That combination of historian and growth advisor made for a fascinating conversation.
Miguel naturally looks at what’s changing. But he also looks for what doesn’t change.
Here are the top ideas from our conversation that have stayed with me.
1. At some point, proof has to precede investment.
Before meaningful revenue, companies have no choice but to make good bets with incomplete evidence. Investment is often what allows them to create the proof they don’t yet have.
But as evidence accumulates, the basis for investment should change.
Miguel’s warning is against continuing to bet heavily on assumptions when you now have the opportunity to validate them — whether that’s investing in a market you don’t understand well enough, adding people before the commercial engine can support them, or scaling something customers haven’t sufficiently validated.
So $1M isn’t a magic number. What’s important is the shift in sequence:
Early on: Investment leads to Proof
As the company matures: Proof leads to Investment leads to Scale
At some point, what you know must begin to carry more weight than what you believe.
2. Build organizational capability early. Organizational size can wait.
When I asked Miguel when growth stops being about individual talent and starts becoming about organizational capability, he didn’t hesitate:
“From the very beginning.”
Founders can’t build scalable companies by doing everything themselves.
Miguel believes they need to find complementary people early, invest in exceptional first employees, delegate responsibility and begin creating processes that allow knowledge and capability to live in the organization rather than solely in individuals.
He offered a useful test:
If one talented person leaves, does the capability leave with them?
If the answer is yes, you haven’t actually built organizational capability yet. But here’s what makes Miguel’s perspective more nuanced: He also warns companies against hiring too early. Those ideas aren’t contradictory. Building organizational capability early doesn’t mean building organizational size early.
The first is necessary for scale. The second should follow evidence that there’s something worth scaling.
3. Hiring experienced people isn’t enough. You have to let them do their jobs.
Miguel thinks about a leadership team a little like a rock-and-roll band.
You need different capabilities.
- Someone creating the vision.
- Someone making the operation work.
- Someone building the product.
- Someone building the commercial engine.
But having all the instruments on stage doesn’t create music.
They have to play together.
And that requires something founders sometimes find extraordinarily difficult: recognizing where someone else knows more than they do — and giving that person real authority to act.
Miguel has seen founders successfully evolve with their companies when they understand their own strengths and limitations, keep learning, surround themselves with complementary people and actually listen to them.
One of his red flags is the leader who remains stuck in the “good old days” — convinced that because something worked before, it remains the right answer now.
And Miguel asks the founders he works with another question that founders aren’t asked often enough:
Do you actually want the job your company now needs you to do?
Being capable of evolving into the next version of yourself doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how you want to spend your life. Or as we like to say: “Just because you can doesn’t automatically mean that you should.”
4. In a world obsessed with what’s changing, study what endures.
This may be the insight that is most uniquely Miguel.
Perhaps it’s the historian in him.
When I asked what principles he believed would still matter 20 years from now, Miguel didn’t try to predict what technology we’ll be using. He went in the opposite direction.
“Study what has been permanent.”
Markets matter. Competitive advantage matters. Great people matter. Economics matter. Timing matters. Human behaviour matters.
Technology, tools and tactics will continue changing — probably faster than ever. Miguel is hardly resistant to that change. He talks about AI as another member of the team and believes companies should use it to liberate and amplify human talent.
But new doesn’t automatically mean fundamental.
One of the capabilities leaders increasingly need is the ability to distinguish between something that is genuinely changing the fundamentals of business and something that is simply new. That’s a very different posture from either resisting change or chasing every “shiny thing.” To paraphrase Miguel: embrace what’s new, understand what’s changing and know what endures.
A sincere thank you to Miguel Trujillo for sharing his experience, perspective and expertise with the Enduring GROWTH System™ Research Program. Miguel brought a distinctly European perspective to our research, shaped by his work with entrepreneurs, investors and growth companies across multiple countries and stages of evolution. And yet, so many of the principles that emerged from our conversation felt remarkably universal — a reminder that while markets and circumstances may differ, many of the fundamentals of enduring growth do not. His unusual journey from historian to entrepreneur, investor and growth advisor only added to that lens, reinforcing the importance of understanding both what changes and what endures as companies grow.
To learn more from Miguel, connect with him on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/googlehumano/
To learn more about his company, visit his LinkedIn company page here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/miguelangeltrujillo/