| I agree we need to companies that don't chase exponential growth. That being said, I am not sure if this advice is broadly applicable: 1. If you take VC money, they are not going to keep giving you more money if all you can show is linear growth. It may take a really long time for the company to become self-sustaining and just will not work with VC economics. Expecting them to change their mindset is not realistic unless the fundamentals also change. 2. If you don't need VC money, then you probably are not chasing exponential growth anyways. You have limited capital so you build a sustainable business (if your idea has legs) by chasing meaningful growth. So this article does not impact these companies. 3. If you are one of those rare companies that need some good amount of capital initially (hard to penetrate industry like healthcare or finance) but once established, maybe you can build a sustainable business without a lot of new capital. For this group this advice may make sense, find VCs who believe in linear but sustainable growth but you are definitely viable and the returns are still going to be attractive as you may need only 2-3 rounds of funding. I would guess the number of startups that will fall under #3 is going to be really, really small. In short, the article could have just argued for more bootstrapped businesses. But then, there may be many such companies already and we just don't hear about them... So maybe the article's point is to make more of those startups more visible so not everyone thinks they need exponential growth.. That just requires all consumers to crave stories that are ordinary so media companies can start writing less sensationalistic articles... maybe that's the billion dollar startup with linear growth! |