The playbook of scale: how the best companies grow

Wintercircus Gent, last night 10/02/26. Roeland Delrue (Aikido Security) and Cameron Deatsch (ex-Atlassian, now VC) on stage about scaling. Louis Jonckheere moderating. Three very different perspectives, and a few things worth sharing.

Swim in the red ocean

Roeland opened with something that goes against conventional startup wisdom: Aikido deliberately chose the red ocean. Cybersecurity is packed. Established players everywhere, Gartner magic quadrants, enterprise sales armies with expensive steak dinners in Vegas.

His reasoning is simple. In the red ocean, there is massive churn. These incumbent companies are so big and so bloated that they have thousands of unhappy customers constantly looking for something better. Blue ocean sounds sexy in a pitch deck, but the red ocean has actual demand.

The playbook: make a list of everything the big players do, then do the exact opposite. Palo Alto Networks sits at 6.2 billion in revenue with 15,000 employees. Aikido’s answer: strip out the bloat, kill the traditional sales cycle, obsess over speed.

2 minutes and 34 seconds

That is how long it takes a new Aikido user to get their first scanning results.

The enterprise competition? A 200K quote. Two months of implementation. Six months before you even experience value. The aha moment comes way after the signature. Roeland flips that: move the aha moment to before the purchase decision. Try for free, see results, then decide.

No forced sales calls. No mandatory demos. You can talk to sales if you want, but the product does the heavy lifting.

Automation last

This one is counterintuitive for a lot of founders I work with. Aikido has 2000+ external Slack channels with customers. Another 500+ on Microsoft Teams. When a lead comes in, they research the person on LinkedIn, send a personalized message through whatever channel that person actually uses.

The principle is dead simple: do it manually first. Learn what works. Then automate. Most companies build the automated system first and wonder why nobody responds.

€3,000 video, 300,000 impressions

Aikido’s marketing is what happens when you combine zero budget with zero fear of being ridiculous. The Anti-Magic Quadrant Club which openly mocks Gartner’s pay-to-play system. Rebranding as “OnlyScans” for April Fools. Custom “no bullshit” paper rolls at conference booths.

They now run two conference booths side by side. One for Aikido, one for the Anti-Magic Quadrant Club. The club booth gets more visitors.

None of this costs millions. It costs creativity and the willingness to not take yourself too seriously. And for a Belgian company competing against US enterprise giants, that asymmetry is everything.

Know your math

Cameron’s perspective was completely different. 12 years at Atlassian, scaling from roughly $150 million to $3.5 billion in revenue. His core message: know your financial model, then build a machine with levers you can pull.

He walked through it concretely. Start at $10 million in ARR. When most companies think about doubling their target, they think about doubling the sales team. He sees it differently: your existing base naturally delivers some growth. At Atlassian, 11% expansion happened like clockwork. That is $11 million without doing anything.

Then the levers. Cross-sell more products to existing customers, $11M becomes $13M. Upsell from basic to premium to enterprise, $13M to $15M. Annual price increases tiered by plan level, $15M to $16.5M. Net new customers through marketing and PLG, another $3.5M.

$10M becomes $20M. Each lever is independently targetable, budgetable, scalable.

Unreasonable vision, practical execution

Atlassian’s BHAG evolved from 30,000 customers to “every knowledge worker on the planet uses us once a month.” That is unreasonable. That is supposed to be unreasonable. The point is having a north star you cannot fully plan towards, but that pulls the organization forward in a clear direction.

The trap Cameron sees constantly: all vision, no execution. Or worse, top-down vision meets bottom-up planning chaos. His diagnostic question is brutal in its simplicity: “What did we deliver last month?”

The shared warning

Both speakers landed on the same thing: do not scale prematurely. Roeland calls it the number one founder mistake, hiring sales reps before the product backs it up. Cameron described the Atlassian version: every expansion adds complexity that dilutes trust and clarity.

The near-death moment nobody talks about

Louis asked Roeland about a phone call in the early days where Aikido almost stopped. The story: eight months in, eight customers, roughly 30-40K in revenue, 800K euros already burnt. They seriously considered returning the remaining money to investors and calling it quits. But then it started to click. Looking back, all the foundations were there. They just needed a bit more time for the market to trust them.

Cameron’s version was different. Even at $1.7 billion in revenue, 35% year-on-year growth, you could not be more paranoid that everything could end tomorrow. And then an Aikido shows up in your market and suddenly a customer you thought was safe is talking to a startup in Belgium.

Culture changes, values stay

Cameron had a line I liked: at Atlassian, the mantra was “culture changes, the values stay the same.” You cannot go from 30 people in a Sydney office to 5,000 globally and keep the same culture. But the values (open company, no bullshit, play as a team, build with heart and balance, do not mess over the customer) do not change.

Roeland’s Aikido values echo this: no bullshit (in marketing, product, and between people), do not assume bad intent in written communication, be humble, keep it simple, and disagree then commit.

Louis added a sharp warning from his own experience at Showpad. “Be humble” and “keep it simple” were core values too. They held for a long time. But then they hired seasoned US sales leadership coming from large companies preparing for IPO. Those people were not humble and did not keep things simple. It had, in his words, a catastrophic impact on growth for a few years. Values are not just wall decorations.

The pricing angle

For those of you who follow me for the pricing stuff, this evening was full of it, even though neither speaker was explicitly talking about pricing.

PLG is a pricing strategy, not just a growth tactic. Aikido’s model (value before purchase) fundamentally changes pricing dynamics. When someone has already experienced results in under 3 minutes, the price conversation is different. You are not selling a promise anymore. You are confirming a decision they have already made.

Annual price increases are a lever, not a crisis. Cameron was completely matter-of-fact about it. Higher tiers got 10% increases, lower tiers 4%. Planned. Annual. Tiered. That single lever moved Atlassian from $15M to $16.5M. Too many scale-ups I work with treat price increases as a one-time emergency measure instead of a recurring, planned growth driver.

Expansion revenue is where the real money is. Out of Cameron’s $10M-to-$20M path, net new customers were only part of the story. The bulk came from cross-sell, upsell, and price increases on the existing base. Your most important pricing decisions are not about acquisition. They are about expansion architecture.

Zero discount authority as a pricing discipline. At Atlassian, sales reps had zero discount authority. Zero. The head of enterprise sales got three discount approvals per quarter. If they had to discount to win deals, they were priced wrong. Instead, Atlassian ran programmatic discounts available to every customer equally: upgrade to premium this year, get 15% off. No hidden deals, no “talk to the right VP” games. That is pricing integrity at scale, and it is rare.

Competitive pricing done right. Roeland was refreshingly blunt: he knows his competitor prices by heart. Aikido positions as the cost leader by design. This is not a race to the bottom. It is a deliberate competitive wedge that works because their cost structure (no massive sales army, no US-level overhead) actually supports it.

Good evening at Wintercircus. Two completely different companies, two different growth stages, but the same underlying thread: scale is not about doing more of the same, louder. It is about knowing your math, staying close to your customers, and building systems that compound.

Want to discuss how these scaling lessons apply to your pricing? Book a conversation.