[mschuster91]

> Making it worse is that we’re all heavily socialized to aim for mediocre success. Schools, universities, large organizations — they don’t want big swings and big misses; they want safety and consistency. A steady 7 is better than 10s interspersed with 0s. This might work well in structured, predictable environments, but in startup-land it’s anathema.

Correction: It's anathema for VC-funded startups whose backers need one or two to succeed to unicorn size to recoup their losses from the other 98 attempts. For self-funded or privately/bank financed startups, it's fine to stay low profile and grow slowly, as long as the investors get their money back and everyone gets paid fairly. You may not end up a billionaire, but hell, even a small trades shop can reasonably be worth a million dollars or two after a few decades.

It's after all how the many, many "hidden champions" of Germany's Mittelstand got to where they are: start small, focus on extremely high quality products/services, and dominate entire markets even though no one but experts of their respective fields have even heard of them. And that model working out isn't restricted to Germany either... Japanese YKK zippers are the best example there [1].

A side note: if you don't have VCs or, worse, the vipers of the public stock market breathing down your neck, you have so much more freedom as a founder. You can do what's best for the company long term.

[1] https://slate.com/business/2012/04/ykk-zippers-why-so-many-d...