> Slow and sustainable growth may increase short-term survival chances, but guarantees that you lose in the long-term.
I'm arguing the exact opposite: that slow and sustainable growth is exactly how you maximize long-term success.
And there are very, very few markets that are truly "winner-take-all". They only seem that way because everybody's doing the exact thing against which I'm warning: trying to emulate and catch up to already-big players instead of carving out their niche and playing the long game.
> If Instagram or AirBnb didn't plan for rapid scalability, and focused on short-term sustainability instead, they'd almost certainly be footnotes.
Statistically speaking, they'd almost certainly have been footnotes anyway. That's the nature of startups that pursue VC-powered hypergrowth: you're counting on a heck of a lot of luck.
(And not that I'd be complaining much if those companies were footnotes, either; AirBnb in particular has done a great job of exacerbating housing crises around the world, and Instagram - like most social networks - seems to rely entirely on throwing every dark pattern imaginable at its users, even before Facebook bought it. Good riddance to the both of 'em.)
