Modesty is an underappreciated aspect of running a successful company. The endless pursuit of growth is usually a byproduct of ego or at the behest of some intangible idea of "creating shareholder value."
Just fucking create a killer product and work on refining that product to the best of your abilities. If you get bored, start a new company. You don't have to grow every company into the next Apple.
I don’t think we need to jump to “these dummies can’t conceive of a world outside of VC”…
Uber already took a huge amount of VC funding, so mid-size strategies won’t work. Investors would rather risk the whole company on a 1% chance of becoming Google or Home Depot than take a 50% chance of becoming Applebees. Even though Applebees is presumably a nice, profitable business, those kind of numbers are not useful for the portfolio position they have Uber in.
That’s just the reality for the folks running Uber today. If they try to turn it into a mid-sized business, the board will fire them.
If I read the discussion charitably, someone up-thread wanted to shift the conversation to “what should’ve Uber done in 2012?” while their responders think they’re talking about “What can Uber do at this point?”
I don’t think you need to act like we’re incapable of thinking about building businesses smaller than Google.
And more importantly, they lose the ability to liken themselves to Steve Jobs. This is often cited as the final stage of social suicide for many founders.
> The endless pursuit of growth is usually a byproduct of ego or at the behest of some intangible idea of "creating shareholder value."
If you don't want to grow that's fine, but then don't go public and don't seek VC funding. Investors make money when you grow; they generally don't make much when you don't. Ergo, they will always be pushing you to grow.
Just fucking create a killer product and work on refining that product to the best of your abilities. If you get bored, start a new company. You don't have to grow every company into the next Apple.