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Key Takeaways Through discussions with over 45 leaders, we uncovered seven leadership principles that fueled our journey from startup to market leader.
These principles can be applied by leaders in any industry who are seeking both business and personal growth.
At first, a startup often lacks resources but has a handful of driven people who know and trust each other to take ownership. As the company grows, they become the main driving force — leaders who build teams and departments. As growth accelerates and more people join, it becomes harder to ensure that the same leadership ethos keeps the company agile and goal-oriented across departments.
Last year, Oxylabs celebrated its 10th birthday and the journey that made us one of the market leaders in public web data scraping. We brought together over 45 leaders across departments and experience levels to understand which leadership traits mattered most throughout this journey.
The learnings from these consultations were distilled into seven leadership principles. While coming from the fast-paced data industry, they should also prove valuable to all leaders seeking business and personal growth across industries.
Principle 1: Push business forward
In tech, there can be a temptation to build exquisitely architected solutions without considering if they are the best way to solve real customer problems. We are still in the AI washing boom, when companies add a thin layer of AI on legacy solutions just to stick the AI label on them.
Companies don’t help clients this way. And they don’t push business forward beyond short-term sales. Instead, leaders should think strategically about long-term success. It’s okay if your technology is not as cutting-edge as AI if it still does the job effectively. And calling AI what is essentially just a different interface for ChatGPT hurts long-term reputation.
Another issue is when managers are too attached to reaching their department’s goals. Having goals and planning for them is important. But so is knowing when not reaching them is not a failure. Great leaders think like owners. They see the bigger picture and understand how daily activities contribute to achieving the company’s goals.
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