Earlier in her career, Karen Rhorer was rising through the sales ops leadership ranks and working with her team to come up with an aggressive hiring plan, trying to reverse engineer the sales team capable of delivering the equally aggressive bookings numbers that their startup had set.

At the time, this move seemed in-line with conventional thinking, which was steeped in hypergrowth and the triple triple double double double mantra that drove startups to sell more, faster. But that pressure to hit those top-line growth numbers created blinders that left one side of the equation out entirely: sustainability. Like many other companies, Rhorer’s startup didn’t realize early enough that the math wasn’t supporting the sheer amount of cash they were burning in a quest for growth. And just a few years later, it all came home to roost — and nearly 40% of the staff had to be laid off.