When you picture a successful entrepreneur, how old are they?

If your LinkedIn profile looks anything like mine, you’ve probably racked up plenty of endorsements for your professional skills. Rolled out back in 2012, endorsements are essentially thumbs up from your colleagues showing that you excel at something at work.

Recently, I broke some major company news … on Snapchat.

Originally published on Linkedin Pulse. 

Years ago, an acquaintance of mine was living in Canada’s Far North. He spent some time in a tiny community that was only accessible by plane.

Before he joined Hootsuite last year, our senior VP of product, Andrew, co-founded a chain of bike and ski shops. He was founding investor. He hired. He strategized. If something went wrong, he was on the hook.

California has its share of famous streets: Sunset Strip, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood Boulevard. But for entrepreneurs, the real main drag is Sand Hill Road. Lining this stretch of asphalt outside Menlo Park are a who’s who of elite venture capital firms. Nearly every top Silicon Valley company has started here.

This is the story of a $200 t-shirt … and company systems gone terribly wrong. Earlier this year, an employee wanted to send a shirt with our logo to a customer as a gift. There was nothing special about this particular shirt. It was an ordinary, 100%-cotton crew neck. But by the time this employee got approval — factoring in his own time and everyone else’s up the org chart who had to weigh in to validate the request — the cost of this t-shirt had ballooned to $200 … if not more.

One out of every five of my employees won’t be in their roles next year. And I couldn’t be happier.

I’ll come clean: For years, my company never had a customer-service phone number on our website. When Hootsuite started, with just a few dozen employees, we were honestly worried about being swamped with calls from our millions of users. But for some reason, even as we grew to hundreds of employees, we never shared a phone line on our site.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. Way back when Facebook, Twitter and other networks were getting started, they were billed as channels where businesses could connect — for free — directly with their customers. The formula for success was simple: share catchy updates, build an audience, cash in.