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We have spies everywhere
As a firm, and not just through one board member, Altos tries to know its largest companies deeply. Several now have billions or tens of billions of dollars in revenue and tens of thousands of employees, and the firm has relationships two, three, four, and five layers below the founder.
At Coupang, partner Han's daughter worked as an individual contributor many layers below the CEO. The Altos team spans ages decades apart, so their friends differ, and the firm has connections from very young to much older. The firm likes to call it having spies everywhere.
Those connections show whether people leave because they are disgruntled and the company is going nowhere, or stay because it's the best job they've ever had. The lessons from building large businesses go to the next generation of entrepreneurs, along with the networks that form among the alumni of these companies.
How did Coupang grow so large?
Bom Kim founded Coupang in Seoul in 2010, first as a group-buying site and then as an e-commerce company. It built its own warehouses and delivery network to offer fast delivery. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021 and raised about 4.6 billion dollars. Its Rocket Delivery service promised next-day arrival across much of Korea.
How do company alumni networks spread?
The best-known example is the PayPal Mafia, former PayPal employees who went on to found or fund Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp. Fortune magazine popularized the name in a 2007 article. Former employees carry what they learned about scaling a company into new ventures and often back each other. Investors with relationships inside a company's alumni network hear about the next generation of founders early.
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