Anand Rajaraman says that any startup that’s not growing is dying, and that if a startup isn’t going to succeed, it may as well die quickly. It’s outstanding tonic for the Sequoia RIP: Good Times presentation that seems to have been absorbed by everyone in the Internet business. I would guess that in five years, very few of the startups that decided to hunker down and wait for better times will be around.
November 23, 2008 at 10:53 am
I’ve experienced exactly the situation described in your ‘die quickly’ link. I’ve worked in two startups that were in zombie mode; one of them lasted for several years before the VCs finally had to close it down, the other was finally sold in a fire sale. It’s crazy.
Of course, zombie mode is an effect, not a cause. Anand hits on the real problem here:
I really don’t want to work at any more VC-funded companies for this reason. Such short-sighted management is just crazy.
November 30, 2008 at 5:43 am
The not growing/dying idiom is not new; I had a CTO say that to me (verbatim) in 1995. He was arguably wrong then; massive overgrowth definitely contributed to the company’s three rounds of layoffs a year later.