ServiceNow came this close to making a $150B+ mistake by selling too early. From a solo founder picking himself up after financial ruin to one of the biggest SaaS companies in the world, here are lessons from the epic story of ServiceNow:‍

• You don’t have to be first
  ‍Fred Luddy didn’t invent the IT workflow software category when he started ServiceNow in 2004. But he knew it could be done differently. If you can solve the problem in a different and radically better way, you can win.
• Simplicity scales
  ‍Fred’s stroke of genius was to create a product so simple and intuitive that it could easily be adapted for workflow uses beyond IT. When department heads came to IT managers with a request to provision software for new workflows, IT managers recommended ServiceNow—and it organically spread through the organization, from HR to Marketing and beyond. IT managers became ServiceNow’s beachhead to evangelize the product for wider adoption in the enterprise.
• Explosive growth: be careful what you wish for
  Explosive growth without the infrastructure to support the product and the customer experience can cause your company to collapse. ServiceNow was being “buried under its own success” when Fred began the search for a new CEO who could scale the company to new levels. When CEO Frank Slootman joined, Doug Leone says they were “90 days from going out of business.” Running lean is good, but running too lean is a dangerous liability.
• Know when to bring in outside leadership
  ‍Fred Luddy made the difficult but necessary decision to step aside as CEO and bring in Frank Slootman to scale the company. Recognizing your own limitations as a founder and finding complementary leadership is crucial for growth.
• Scaling can mean ripping up the playbook and starting over
  ‍Amid serious outages, one critical challenge Frank faced was overhauling ServiceNow’s cloud infrastructure to make the product reliable. As a cloud pioneer, there was no playbook to reference. Frank and his team started down the wrong road more than once, ripped up the playbook, replaced team members, and iterated until they got it right.
• Keep growing the pie
  ‍Frank took the extensibility inherent in Fred’s product design, and merchandised it into a wider and wider set of formal product offerings, expanding the company from a narrow IT help desk replacement tool to being the “ERP for IT,” selling licenses across the organization. Widening its remit is what has allowed ServiceNow to keep growing into the behemoth it is today.
• Expand the scale of your ambition, and don’t underestimate the long-term
  ‍When VMware approached ServiceNow with an acquisition offer of $2.5B, Fred, Frank and the board were all ready to sell. But Doug Leone was convinced it was too early and that the company had far more potential ahead of it. Fred recalls Doug’s pitch that if it remained independent, it could reach a valuation of $10B. “The only question that matters is, What can this company be five years from now, seven years from now, ten years from now?” says Doug. Doug convinced the company not to sell; 12 years later, it’s worth over $150B.