There’s a reason why nothing kills faster than success: everything breaks at scale.

Today’s guest is Anthony Bucci, the co-founder and former CEO of the incredibly successful company, RevZilla. As CEO, Anthony navigated RevZilla doubling in revenue almost every year – without raising any outside money.

Anthony provides a unique retrospective on today’s podcast. He’s had a chance to reflect on his experiences inside the rocketship company. He now wants to help normalize the journey for anyone listening to this podcast.

We spent over 2 hours with Anthony covering a wide variety of topics. To break down the episodes into digestible bites, we’ve broken up our interview in three parts:

1. Episode 1 (Today’s Episode): You’ll hear the process Anthony and his co-founders used to start and generate the idea for the company that became RevZilla. Anthony also goes into great detail about how they differentiated themselves and quickly scaled from $0 to over $140 million in annual revenues. Anthony shares why and how they achieved hyper-growth without raising money.
2. Episode 2: Anthony’s provides specific details of how they approached promoting and hiring, ahead of scale. He offers insights and lessons learned about how to scale people, processes and product – before everything breaks. He also shares what how he utilizes executive coaches, mentors and advisors.
3. Episode 3: Anthony brings it all home by sharing his perspectives, experiences and journey of merging with another company, stepping down as the CEO and what it is like moving from the fast lane to the family lane.

Be sure to subscribe on iTunes (or Spotify or Overcast) to make sure you don’t miss one of these compelling episodes.

Other topics from today’s episode include:

• The process Anthony and his co-founders used to generate the idea for RevZilla
• Why RevZilla didn’t raise any money and how it helped (and hurt) them
• If you have raised growth capital, the lessons you can learn from a company that never raised money
• How everything breaks at scale and what Anthony and the Revzilla team did to predict and prepare (as opposed to seeing and solving) for explosive growth
• How to evolve from Founder to Maker to Manager to Executive to Servant Leader
• The advice he gives to other entrepreneurs about raising money
• How to get smart money’s advice without raising any money
• The obstacles RevZilla faced scaling the business
• The concept of Strategic Pillars and the specific pillars RevZilla used to get and keep people focused
• How RevZilla differentiated between other online stores, like Amazon