In our 25+ experience in business, we have seen companies come and go, companies that looked very powerful externally that stagnate and crumble. Reason? Cultural decay within. How does that happen to seemingly very successful companies? There is a startup religion that preaches ultra-fast growth, growth measured weekly(!), a religion pushed by people who have never built long term durable companies themselves and VCs who love that model. Such extreme growth obsession exacts a long term toll. Excessive growth addiction hides the fact that there is only so far you can push people before they break. The damage can be subtle. It is easy to paper over the damage by “professionalizing” the environment under the theory that one professional is substitutable by another. When a crisis comes or simply when growth slows, the growth obsessed company that cycled through people finds itself stranded and lost because the people that are there now have no shared experience or institutional memory of facing challenges and overcoming them. The external world may still be in awe of this growth darling but internally the rot has set in and becomes very hard to reverse because of the by now established culture of cycling through people. This has almost become a pattern with hyper growth VC funded companies. 🙏