Ruckus hasn’t faced that problem yet – even though CEO Lo was bequeathed with $30 million in venture capital last year, has the attention of national media outlets and is holding meetings with the likes of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Her three-year-old company has about 60 employees and manufactures multiple- input, multiple-output (MIMO) antenna boxes that speed video streaming over Wi-Fi connections.

What brought the company into national scrutiny and board room discomfort was Lo’s decision to market Internet Protocol Televison (IPTV) distribution. IPTV is pretty much a Wi-Fi connection to your TV. Ruckus started letting its service providers test the product called MediaFlex in the first quarter of 2005. It generated a lot of hype, but there were no further deployments until the second half of 2006 – and that mostly in Europe. To get anything, Lo had to time everything.

“By the middle of 2005, I had 80 carriers testing my stuff,” Lo says. “If I based my hiring on all those carriers converting to buying customers by Q4, then I would have been bankrupt. In my business, it’s slow to acquire a customer. But once you do, they can really push your volume – and that’s the hardest growth to control.”

She learned that lesson 10 years ago when she was with a start-up called Adaptive, a maker of ATM local-area networks. There were only a few companies that could compete, such as FORE Systems Inc. the brainchild of Eric Cooper, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. But timely product deployment was essential.

“Adaptive had the best product, but it wasn’t ready,” Lo recalls. “Because of that, FORE Systems benefited – and that is something I will always remember. Timing is the most critical thing.”

At StubHub, after scoring the MLB contract, Fluhr noticed the company was growing in a business-to- business trajectory, which at the time he thought was fine. The early strategy was dependent upon that model, working with teams and media partners and leveraging others – not building a brand. It was working well, Fluhr recalls, but following that path would have precluded success because of the competition.

“We’re now a more consumer-oriented company, getting more consumers to come to the site, not just getting customers through other websites,” he says.

Then there was a second issue behind the fast growth – infrastructure. “We were growing so rapidly that a lot of the infrastructure, the people and systems in some of the less revenue-generating areas [human resources, accounting] had been less mature than a lot of the revenue-focused areas,” Fluhr says. “We always struggled there.”

Quick growth will do that, as Willcutts attests.

“It does put a strain on an organization to grow in $100 million increments annually,” he says, adding that it is common to have the current core team be completely different from the one you started with - founders included. That, he says, is one of the greatest challenges in growing, not just for him but for employees.

HITS AND MISSES

When the company found clients who did business in multiple states, some employees, who were used to regional responsibility, couldn’t take it. “You’ve got to get someone over me, I can’t handle this responsibility,” Willcutts recalls a key employee saying shortly after the company doubled in size. His head of call centers, for instance, had begun at ACM with three people under her and now she’s in charge of 150. “That’s a
great success story,” he says. Willcutts’ venture board now helps find employees who are prepared to grow alongside the company. ACM now has 350 employees nationwide and is considering going public.

Companies experiencing similar growth, Willcutts says, should focus on primary goals. His dad, a physician in Massachusetts, where Willcutts spent his teens and 20s doing home infusion from dad’s specialty pharmacy, used to tell his son to treat his future business like a residency. So Willcutts, who majored in English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Penn., made sure he worked at an almost “obsessive” rate to keep his company focused on infusion, specialty drugs and related nursing services, and  medical equipment. “Keeping that focus is important we believe because it’s then easier to pursue the next exciting thing.”

In January, Ruckus sold 100,000 MediaFlex systems to 125 customers throughout Europe and the United States. Lo’s goal is to take the Wi-Fi solution beyond TV and establish it throughout the house, from the kitchen to the furnace downstairs. She wants customers on their way home from work to be able click a few buttons and be able to preheat their ovens, turn on the porch light or program their TIVOs.

“I’ve always been in the enterprise phase [of a company],” she says, “and I found it fascinating that I can build a product I can use myself. It was pure curiosity that got me in the door and then once you’re in, you don’t look back.”

Also in January, eBay Inc. purchased StubHub for $310 million, a deal that will likely close by the first quarter of 2007. EBay will fuse StubHub’s technology with its own tickets business. Neither Fluhr nor eBay said whether StubHub employees would lose
their jobs.

ACM, maintains its office in Pasadena, but has since moved its headquarters to Minneapolis. It now serves more than 35 million people using managed care.