I've always felt Peloton was a great product, that Stitchfix was a great service, Blue Apron was a lovely idea, it's just they never appealed to me to become their customers. And that's great.
For most of human history, it's been OK to grow to become a billion dollar company over a decade. But these days, investors and founders felt otherwise. These days it seems you need to grow ultra-quickly and become absolutely vast, or else. It seems like being worth less than $50bn, shows a lack of ambition.
Which begs the question, why do all companies need to be worth billions to be called "successful"? Why does growth need to be near vertical and not profitable and sustainable?
Why do we think someone leading a $10bn Unicorn must be far better than someone running a $20m company?
Why do companies need to absorb vast amounts of VC cash, to grow insanely fast? It's like we've fallen in love with steroids not ideas, with growth not impact.
IMHO Airbnb is a wonderful company and brilliant idea, but would be superb as a medium sized company, with a community of lovely hosts and great guests, but with a typical market cap of $100bn over the last few years, it can only justify this by growing endlessly to become by far the biggest hotel like chain the world has ever seen.
As such it must bring in new more commercial hosts, who want to rent out hundreds of apartments, and deliver the lowest service levels, maximum occupancy levels, to make the most money, and who then elevate local home prices and increase rent, and put pressure on local communities. As such, new guests see places not as homes to cherish, but as bases to exploit.
I'm not quite sure why it became such that we live in an age where small or medium sized companies, that offer a great service, that use sensible marketing budgets to organically grow, that employ great staff who earn nice salaries an and get looked after, that make a good profit to allow the founders to feel proud and enjoy their success, have become stigmatized and overlooked.
Instead the world seems to favor the sociopathic need to grab everything. Companies must raise as much money as possible, make the most outlandish claims of future growth, spend huge sums on advertising ( boosting vast digital platforms) , hire as many people as possible, all lured by stories of untold wealth via equity.
We seem to hero worship types like the founders of WeWork, Theranos, Instacart, GoPuff, Palantir, Upstart, Bolt, Coinbase, Crypto. com, Clubhouse, Yuga labs, despite these almost all being destined to collapse due to an inability to support their promised future growth.
Can't we be a little more balanced, honest, sustainable?
How can we shift to celebrate the small or medium sized companies making decent stuff.
The founders who filled a brilliant gap in the market, without being driven by greed and impatience.
Maybe the problem is the culture and the expectations, so how can we change that?
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