2. People who get overwhelmed or comfortable, and stop growing ⚖️ (lifestyle)
3. People who grow steadily, year after year 📈 (compounders)
4. People who blitzscale 🚀(venture) ...
Each is specific to personality....
Some entrepreneurs feel an insatiable need to grow.
Others get to a certain point and stop, due to lifestyle or personality.
So, once you get to a point of comfort, why keep growing?...
So many people think growth = greed.
The reality:
If you don't grow your revenue, you can provide ZERO upside to your employees.
No growth = no raises. No promotions. No new roles. No new interesting people to work with. No new challenges.
The best people will leave...
In this way, a company becomes a beast you need to feed:
More employees = more need for opportunity.
More people depending on you for upside, meaning, and career progression.
More need to try new things and grow....
There are many flavours of this.
I know people who run bootstrapped companies that have one bespoke product and a relatively small team, even after 20 years.
I also know people with 5,000 employees and 20+ businesses after 20 years....
In both cases, one thing has been key to success:
Steady growth.
Obviously at different rates, but no matter what, both businesses need to keep growing enough that everyone can get a raise, promotion, do more interesting work, etc...
I can think of very few businesses that don't grow and can continue to employ the best people, keep them happy and engaged, and stay in business longterm.
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One of the worst parts about getting big is that you can't do as much small stuff.
The small stuff is chaotic, but sometimes it's the coolest.
For example:
Slack was only 3 people when @metalab designed the first version.
2/ But it was a TINY project. I think we lost money on it.
About 2 years ago, we realized that, while MetaLab still works with tons of startups, we were turning away a lot of cool projects due to project size...
3/ We had endless demand from incredible startups and small and medium-sized businesses, but we had to turn most of them away.