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It turns out that it is hard to be specific, other than the longer you have that sort of growth, the better. Also, it is, perhaps, obvious that large percentage
by geoff 11y ago
It turns out that it is hard to be specific, other than the longer you have that sort of growth, the better. Also, it is, perhaps, obvious that large percentage growth beginning from very small numbers is not as impressive as sustained growth even as the numbers get larger. Impressive / interesting growth is very much in the eye of the beholder, and most investors will just say they know impressive when they see it. This being said, I take the point that more discussion around this point would be helpful (unfortunately, this is true about much of the guide and I was trying to keep it reasonably short).
- cperciva 11y agoThank you! Your point about "starting from small numbers" is something else I was considering -- obviously increasing from $1/week to $10/week of revenue over the course of three months is not that impressive, despite being a 20%/week growth rate! I wonder if a good way to explain this would be via examples of (starting point, growth rate, duration) tuples and an "interesting" / "not interesting" assessment for each. (Can YC publish anonymized data on its portfolio companies?) This would allow readers to look for an example which roughly matches their performance -- which may sound silly to people in the valley who are surrounded by startups all day long, but there are a lot of us outside of the valley who rarely meet anyone working for a startup and never see any sort of concrete numbers like these. I absolutely agree about keeping the guide short though -- this is more a matter of something I'd like to see you (or someone else at YC) write more about in the future.