The God of Growth

In an isolated system, entropy can only increase

Forget everything you learned in business school. The advice they give you—make more money than you spend—is for people who don’t play VC game.

For a consumer tech company, there is only one god: Growth.

It’s a jealous god. It demands you to forget about profit. It demands you see sustainability as a weakness. It demands total, fanatical devotion to a single metric: acquiring more users, faster than anyone else, at any cost.

This isn't a philosophy. It is the only rule that matters.

Why VC don't care about business

This sounds insane until you understand how the money works. Venture capitalists are not in the business of building "healthy companies." Their model is a power law. They need one monster home run out of a hundred bets to return the entire fund. They don't want a 2x return; they want a 1000x return.

This only happens one way: monopoly.

They are not investing in your P&L statement. They are investing in your ability to conquer an entire market, become the default utility, and then tax everyone who uses it. So when they give you money, they aren't asking you to be sensible. They are ordering you to go to war.

Weapon: unlimited money

To win this war, they hand you a weapon that bends reality: effectively unlimited money. This isn't just funding; it's a war chest so deep you can ignore economic gravity for years.

Your job is to use this weapon to make your product an addiction. You subsidise your customers so aggressively that choosing your service becomes an unconscious reflex. You are not buying customers one by one. You are buying the market's muscle memory. You are making your product cheaper and easier than thinking.

The hunting ground: Dinosaurs

This strategy is most brutal and effective in markets run by dinosaurs. Look at banking, insurance, logistics—industries with fat margins, terrible customer service, and ancient technology. These are your hunting grounds.

The incumbents are slow, profitable, and complacent. They can't compete with you because you're not playing their game. You use your war chest to offer a product that is 10x better for free. You bleed cash, but they haemorrhage market share. Your "race to the bottom" is still a luxury cruise compared to their bloated cost structure. You are not competing; you are orchestrating an extinction.

The endgame

There are two phases to this. First, when you have nothing, you have to survive. You act like a normal business because you have no choice. You prove you can build something people want.

But the moment you take the big money, the mission changes. You are no longer playing to survive. You are playing to dominate. Profitability is a distraction. Your only job is to grow. You are in a land grab, and you must burn the ships.

By the time the money runs out, if you are the last one standing, you have won. You own the market. Profitability, at that point, is no longer a goal. It’s a dial you can turn whenever you want.
But until then, there is only one god.
And it demands growth.

Don’t like that god? Don’t play the game of a consumer tech.