[api]

The reason for prioritizing growth above all else, historically, is network effects. If you try to grow more slowly someone buying growth by foregoing profitability will zoom past you and capture the network, and once the network is captured it's incredibly difficult to disrupt.

A good recent lesson in the awesome power of network effects is X. A huge number of users on that platform hate the direction Elon -- and it -- have taken, but they still use it. Major brands still use it. Governments targeted by people Elon is amplifying use it. Journalists who hate it use it. Why? People use it because people use it, and it's hard to get everyone to migrate at once.

Network effects are a force of nature. They are the strongest possible lock-in.

[rexreed]

I wouldn't necessarily call growth-hacking / blitzscaling to capture customers at a loss network effects. More accurately it's about cornering the market or dominating market share. Network effects are more prominent for things like social media networks where the network value grows exponentially with scale. But not as much for a B2C or B2B solution where there's an identifiable or fixed number of customers and the rocket fueled competitor captures them all with unsustainable pricing.

[gsala]

Indeed. I'm not sure network effects is the main topic here, as you can use Linear perfectly fine when everyone else is using Jira, without missing out on anyrhing. Same applies to many B2B services. Maybe I could see this argument being used for cross-company collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, Miró. But even then it's weak. As you say, cornering the market seems way more important.

[kva]

This Or "Learning Curve Pricing" which dominated the outcomes of early SV.