Tod Sacertodi sold Brightroll to Yahoo for $640M with 8 years of hard work. Started 2006, sold 2014, $640M. Bullet points from a talk he gave at Yahoo, where he shares his learnings:

(#1) If you invested 100k in A round, you’d make 6M in returns.
Know when to overspend. It’s not a linear curve. Pay above market to the "top of the industry” execs / rockstars. Lesson: You can’t overspend on great people.
Start with compensating Talent Acquisition above market. Top dollar for top candidates.
Don't innovate on non core biz stuff. Focus energy on doing few things the best in the industry
Focus on edge cases as they raise the bar for the core as well.
"Be and effective a**hole in your industry"
Raise money from people who know and have low chance of f-up. Leads to lower valuation, but clean cap table pays off. “10% of something is worth more than 50% of nothing"
Create a ‘Tribe’. Successful companies are not a family. They are small, trusting Tribes going after a shared vision. Let people be Tribal.
"Post-traumatic growth is positive psychological state experienced as a result of adversity and other challenges in order to rise to a higher level of functioning.”
Customers share a lot of competitive intel — “every edge of company is a touchpoint of information”

Medium Link: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lessons-learned-at-brightroll-b6b3eb4086ac#.7jnpdoq7x