The chief marketing officer of one of the fastest-growing retailers in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide encouraged attendees at the annual eTail West conference in Palm Springs, Calif., this week to encourage a startup mentality within their companies, regardless of how well established they are.

“Startup is a culture,” says Vishal Agarwal, chief marketing officer of flash-sale e-retailer Choxi.com Inc. “It does not matter what the size of the company is. It’s about the culture. In startups, you’re saying that every person has the potential to reach their full capability and do what they do best.”

Agarwal cited the likes of Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1 in the Top 500), Google and Facebook Inc. as examples of successful companies that have adopted this mentality.

“We advertise with Facebook, and over the past four years the number of new tools and innovations they’ve come out with to try to improve our business is amazing,” he told attendees. “One of the reasons why Google is an amazing startup is because we’ve all heard of Google Wave. It was one of the products launched with a lot of fanfare and Google did not hesitate to shut it down.” Google Wave was a real-time messaging platform unveiled to developers in May 2009 and launched in May 2010. But user adoption did not catch on and in August 2010 Google said it would stop development and it was shut down Wave in April 2012.

Nearly a year into its rebranding from its previous existence as NoMoreRack.com Inc., Choxi (No. 66) isn’t resting on its laurels, despite growing 328% per year from 2011-14 to an Internet Retailer-estimated $700 million from $8.9 million, according to data from Top500Guide.com.

Agarwal says the retailer intends to expand into new product categories and adding more of the products it already carries.

“Currently we have men’s, women’s, apparel, jewelry, clothes, electronics,” he says. “(We’re going to) create more depth in those categories and probably get into furniture, get more into kids and try and explore those verticals more deeply because we as a business model are not constricted.”

He and his team also aren’t satisfied with Choxi’s mobile performance, another area they’re going to look to improve this year.

“We’re working toward implementing Apple Pay,” he says. “Even our mobile web, we want to make it faster.”

With sales still growing rapidly—the e-retailer’s web sales doubled in 2014, according to Internet Retailer’s estimate—Agarwal says it’s been important for his team to keep a startup mentality, with a lean staff in an office environment that encourages employees to suggest new ideas and isn’t afraid of failure.

“Once you grow to a large size, it becomes difficult to keep that culture,” he says. Keeping a startup mindset keeps a company focused on the present because “you create policies and principles for the people that are there, not something that might come five years down the line.” 

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