Growth

“You cannot increment your way out of Like slow growth, right? It's usually something to do with the market structurally, like you have some kind of a problem. So even if you increase your conversion rate by five percent and you do all of these things, it's not…”

“It's a disastrous noise. Values can't come back. You have to start from the foundation, you know, once, I mean, we've heard of a lot of startup examples blowing up, you know, because once you reach a certain size, it's impossible to, you know, sort of revert.”

“Growth is just an arbitrage game. You are competing with every single other person in the world who wants to get their product in front of users. And that means that your lever points are either the content that you make or how you distribute that content.”

“Growth is a trust problem now.”

“If growth isn't accelerating, you're not an AI company.”

“If you're profitable, you're not investing in growth. You're putting cash in the bank, and so you're not going to be growing as fast, almost inevitably. And so to take two businesses at the same ARR and say they're going to be growing the same amount, while on…”

“I think this notion that only growth matters is a very dangerous one, and I've seen this movie many, many times.”

“I think music and growth, they both rely on this just consistent repetition. Like you're constantly making mistakes. You have this super tight feedback loop. You have to get really resilient to just making mistakes all the time. And you know that the way of le…”

“Turnarounds are a lot like growth and people don't realize this. And it's like, you're making lots of decisions. Things are changing very fast and you have to, and you're trying to rebuild the company. It's different than growth where you sort of have a clean …”

“70% of the money is going into growth.”

“I don't personally. For see an environment where growth gets easier for the standard software company.”

“You could copy a product that doesn't get you the customers, and so you have to not only copy the product, you have to figure out how they grow and be as good at growth as them.”

“In today's environment, the actual multiple is five to six times, and that's provided that you have growth. So even though we're moving away from a growth at any cost world to a world where efficiency is prized, the reality is that growth is still worth three …”

“There's three major product groups at Shopify. There's core product, which is basically building the hundred year, the right things for commerce, a hundred years from now. There's merchant services, which is building things like payments, shipping, kind of the…”

“Growth is a bidding war, right? It's a bidding war. It's about whether you're able to bid above everyone else.”

“It used to be growth at any cost, which means that growth really was worth almost, not infinitely more, but probably maybe 15 to 20 times what Free cash flow was worth today. We're in a world where growth is still more valuable than free cash flow, but only th…”

“Overall hedge funds are more underweight growth than at any point Morgan Stanley has seen in the last 10 years.”

“The problem is when you want three things equally, you usually get none. So there are generally in any business at any point in time tends to be some order of priority.”

“How much of growth is actually figuring stuff out? Is actually information discovery rather than running playbooks, doing best practices, copying what other companies did?”

“Retention is a much more difficult thing to solve than growth. Right? Because growth is all upfront. You get the data right away. You can figure that out and move or pivot or persevere with retention. There's a lot of reasons why people may not retain and it t…”

“You see, when it comes to product market fit, growth is and must remain a side effect or byproduct. It is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it has made a goal in itself. You cannot, in the early days, focus obsessively on growth. Growth is a phenome…”

“I'm a big believer that qualitative information is a lot more important than quantitative information in growth.”

“I asked my team to actually plot the regression on this now, just so I could see what today are we valuing the most. And that's this next chart, which basically shows growth is being valued at about three times, right, in the rule of 40 calculation. You know, …”

“Growth and profit are, they battle each other. Let's say we define profit as return on equity. Well, if you're going to increase growth and increase return on equity, how do you do that? Because you're basically going to invest less to get your return on equit…”

“I still believe, and I know it's unpopular this month, but the growth trumps profitability right now, especially if you're early in a market and you're not at scale.”

“Their margins are great, their growth is not. So like six, between six and seven makes sense.”

“I know there's this saying of like, it's growth versus quality, but like, Quality is growth. And if you think about how you can make your product easier to use and more understandable, you know, that will of course drive people to use it and use more of it and…”

“This is not something that I think that you should bank on as a strategy for growth. It's a great add-on, but if you think that press by itself is going to solve your problems, you're wrong, because it might, but it's way too unpredictable.”

“I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction, but actually oftentimes the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to, you know, create, create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel”

“Growth does not mean one thing. As we've talked through, you have to understand the different types of growth systems out there, the ones that work with what types of businesses, and then how do you map talent metrics in other things to those systems. And so I…”

“Great collaborators sometimes are very reticent to present their own opinions because they're so good at assimilating others or people that are amazing at growth struggle to be innovative. People that are world-class storytellers struggle to get in the details…”

“Usually there is a trade-off between trust and growth, right? Because you want to allow for a lot more growth in the system. You want to reduce friction. When you read restriction, you also allowed, allow usually for bad activity to engage as well. And the mor…”

“Growth is extraordinarily hard to come by once you've kind of stopped growing. It is so hard to get something to move up again.”

“If the practice of growth is successful, it should eventually abstract itself away and just be how product and marketing are run.”

“Layoffs don't really solve anything. They're just little, they're little snacks, right? They make little incremental changes, but layoffs don't create growth on their own, right?”

“It just comes down to like growth versus degrowth. Like that is the eternal cultural fight and you can call it capitalism or communism, or you can call it like the state versus the people, or you can call it decentralization versus centralization.”

“When you're listening to the experts or listening to like the, like, you know, the people who have been there, done that, tell you how you need to be growing and tell you how you need to be approaching a problem. You know, it was it was often really bad advice…”

“So growth can only be discussed if you have a strong product market fit. What does it mean to have strong product market fit? Is that you A, have retention obviously, so it takes some time to actually measure retention. And I would say at least six months to a…”

“It's basically whatever it takes to move that one metric you're trying to increase.”

“Growth takes a really long time to build intuition around. So you need to have done a lot of experiments, tried a lot of different things, and growth is a lot about pattern matching.”

“At the end of today, even in this, again, macroeconomic environment, where people are starting to look for also profitability or capital efficiency, still, ladies and gentlemen, growth is the king.”

“Whether you like it or not, and I don't really know if there will be an extended funding winter but it's pretty clear that something has changed in the funding environment in the last couple of days, weeks, and months. Growth is no longer rewarded at any cost.”

“The one that scares me and also excites me is churn. ... I don't say growth, it's churn, for sure.”

“The truth is that growth just destroys cash. Like, no matter how much cash we made, I've, I was spending it on AWS bills. I was spending it with SendGrid.”

“You have to consider that before Value outperformed growth on average six out of seven years in emerging markets, but post 2008 growth, I think has outperformed nine out of 11 years.”

“Growth is about connecting people to the value that's already been created by the business, you know, either through Product or services or whatever. So growth is not about building totally new features, totally new products. It's about once we have those and …”

“Growth is almost always going to be most important, predicated on the fact that, you know, this is a healthy business and one where the math works.”

“If you're a long-term investor, you should probably tilt your portfolio toward value, not growth at this point. You may lose for a while, but in 10 or 20 years, you'll be very happy.”

“Now, the only way it doesn't become a drag on future growth, growth, and it becomes hyperinflationary, is when, logically, governments destroy their currencies, because they can't pay back the debt. But assuming they have to pay back the debt, somebody has to …”

“And so if the truth of your value proposition is super compelling, then growth becomes the exercise of syndicating the truth. And if the truth of your value proposition is not present, you have to grow by throwing money at the problem of growth. You have to sp…”

“It's because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea.”

“The thing is when you are an early stage company, you cannot really afford to plan your growth based on something that's going to happen in three years because you only have money for like eight months.”

“Growth is another word for introducing volatility. Widening the fan of outcomes for that company.”

“And so growth became the strategy of the company, and growth is not a strategy.”

“Growth creates value when there's an argument or there is evidence of operating leverage, because then it creates more profitability.”

“Make it a conscious commitment, not an unconscious commitment, to grow at a pace that enables you, ah, to build an enduring company, not just, you know, one of the top fastest growing companies of the year.”

“And you should be extremely suspicious if you're ever talking about, we're not focused on growth right now. We're not growing that well right now, but we're doing this other thing, you know. We don't have a timeline for when we're gonna ship this, because we'r…”

“And in fact, that's why the faster a business grows, the faster it dies also.”

“Growth is still fundamentally rewarded, and it's the single most correlated variable in the short term To enterprise value. Really, if you deconstruct where the outliers are both good and bad, you'll find that it's efficient growth that's rewarded most.”