Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

Really love this post. My favorite line is:

> Every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.

I think that's pretty insightful. 20% growth is great for a normal business, of course; for a VC-backed startup it can show some warning signs about future hard decisions you might have to face.

I think there's certainly lots of discussion that has been had — and should be had — about "should I or shouldn't I raise money?", but there still are plenty of companies and founders who will raise VC, and paying attention to those early warning signs are important if that's the choice you make. It's important to worry about it each month and each week rather than the two months surrounding the raise of your next round.

These “metrics” are exactly why you see these venture backed SV companies engage in the behavior we saw posted all over the front page of HN yesterday (I.e. silently apply workers tips to their “guaranteed” pay and pocket the difference). But hey it’s an HN/SV unicorn, so there is too much investment that needs to be made back to fail now...and they have the perfect back story, rejected from YC until they personally delivered PG a 6 pack of beer and pretended they had a functional product.

It allows them to continue to make the representations of growth to future investors, the more buy in have from investors, the more you can continue these market/marketing manipulations (e.g. the fyer festival).

Of course the entire SV ethos encourages this behavior: move fast and break things, growth hacking, and fake it till you make it. It’s also built into the system that 9 out of 10 of these scams will fail, but every 10th scam can be offloaded to the public through an IPO.