At a Minnesota High Tech briefing this morning, Digital River (DRIV) CEO, Joel Ronning, described the inherent contradiction between hyper growth and stability. He should know – his company, founded in 1994, now sports a market cap of $2 billion and is growing at a rate of more than 25% per year. If you’ve bought software from Microsoft or Symantec over the Internet, then you’ve visited one of his online stores. According to Ronning, if you want to grow at 25% yearly, then you have to invest a lot of time and money into activities that involve risk. If you want a comfortable, pleasant corporate existence, you’d best stick to a 5% growth rate.
Ronning also shared how his first company, a Mac peripheral provider, went bad in the 1980s because of inventory mismanagement and how the investors booted him out, an event that devastated him emotionally. He then launched a competing firm and avoided the mistakes made with the first company. He eventually grew it to $40 million in four years, which ultimately led him to the Digital River partnership with Fujitsu.
I talked with him after his presentation and was struck by how intelligent and quick he was; he speaks fluently about a lot of different domains – legal, technology, sales – and actually helped me with a question on sales taxes. His willingness to talk about his failures and how he learned from them separates him from the pack of Alpha CEOs I’ve met in the past.
