[direwolf20]

Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years?

A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?

[trueismywork]

Depends on the market size. If the market is 100M, then a 500k profit effectively means your product will be inferior and poorly placed to evolve. If the market is 500k, then by all means go ahead. Startup are designed with explicit purpose of designing a product to capture that market without having to worry about the revenue during the time the product is being made. But of course capture does mean capture quickly because of the first mover advantage.

[krashidov]

Nobody's saying that's bad. but it's not a startup. A "startup" is defined by growth. https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Businesses that don't have the ambition to grow very quickly should not take venture capital. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy

[stavros]

You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?