Being On The Right Path

The real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have.

The growth story has three phases:

• There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.
• As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth.
• Eventually, a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.