Inc. 500

The founders of this year’s Inc. 500 have already scaled great heights. Now they’re reaching for the next big summits

- Leigh Buchanan

That’s the formula CEO Todd Olson followed to drive Pendo, the cloud-based software platform he co-founded in 2013, to $20.9 million in sales in just five years. Olson learned it from a VC who told him that category leaders—the kinds of companies that go public—triple revenue in the first two years after hitting $1 million, and then double it in each of the next three. “I can tell you that second triple was incredibly challenging,” says Olson, who pulled it off by restructuring Pendo’s team and rethinking his product marketing.

Now Olson, a serial entrepreneur with two prior companies under his belt—one failed, one acquired—has landed Pendo on the 2019 Inc. 500. It debuts at No. 73, with 4,267 percent three-year growth, and Olson wants to keep coming back. “People ask me, as CEO, what do you lose sleep over?” he says. “Growing slow.”

Inc.’s annual ranking of the country’s 500 fastest-growing private companies is like one of those cameras that capture light in motion. The 2019 class, which represents some of the most dynamic sectors of the economy, has in the past three years attained a median growth rate of 1,701.4 percent. In service to society’s most cherished metric, it has created 52,000 jobs.

So, all these businesses have achieved. Yet most have not fully arrived. The Inc. 500 is not a list of America’s biggest or most profitable companies. Rather, it is a list of the most promising. The excitement lies in seeing what they will do next. Some will mature into large, public enterprises. Some will transform industries. Some will march steadily forward, improving the lives of ever more customers and employees. Their laurels are for wearing in celebration, not resting on.