GROWTH

Pain plus reflection equals progress.

The best stocks to own are the companies you already use every day. If you use the product and love it, look at the business behind it.

The best salespeople are not born. They are built by rejection.

The secret to AppSumo's success is not genius. It is that we kept showing up and kept shipping.

Your income can only grow to the extent that you do.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. And most importantly, stay committed to serving others.

Every problem is a gift — without problems we would not grow.

Information changes situations.

You can only cut so much. There's no ceiling on what you can earn.

A great business at a fair price beats a mediocre business at a cheap price — every single time over the long run.

Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development.

Where you are is a result of who you were, but where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be.

Your life only gets better when you get better. There is no other way.

We are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber.

The world is not yet fully wired. Most of the economic activity that will happen on the internet hasn't started yet.

I got the CEO thing mostly wrong for the first few years. Turns out, managing people is nothing like managing code.

We gave away the hardware for free. Everyone thought we were crazy. But the transactions are where the money is.

Cash App started as a side project. Now it has more monthly active users than most banks in America.

Forty-five million customers trust us with their money. That number will be a billion within ten years.

We have 100 million customers. That's more than the population of most countries. And we're just getting started.

Profitability isn't something we discovered recently. We've been profitable since 2017. We just didn't make it our personality.

ChatGPT was a research preview. We expected maybe a few thousand people to try it. It hit 100 million in two months.

Growth is oxygen. Without growth, you are slowly asphyxiating.

Free viewers was the most important product decision we ever made. When everyone can see the work, everyone cares about design.

Being from Australia was actually an advantage. We couldn't just rely on the Silicon Valley network. We had to build a product so good that people found us organically.

Everyone was fighting over New York and LA. We went to the suburbs. Turns out, that's where most of America actually lives.

We didn't ask restaurants for permission to list them. We just put up their menus and started delivering. You can apologize later for making someone money.

Food delivery is a trillion-dollar market. We're at maybe 10% penetration. The opportunity isn't behind us — it's barely started.

In March 2020, we went from hiring mode to war mode. We onboarded 300,000 shoppers in 30 days. I didn't sleep for a week.

We started as a disappearing photo app that everyone said was for sexting. Now we reach 75% of 13-to-34-year-olds in the United States. Perception changes.

Eighty percent of our traffic comes from Google searches. We're the only social platform that actually benefits from search engines instead of competing with them.

Every creator who tells their audience about Patreon is doing our marketing for free. The product sells itself through the people who use it.

We went from Funko Pops to Pokémon to sports cards to sneakers to fashion. Each community pulls in the next one. Collectors collect more than one thing.

We were profitable at the unit level from almost the beginning. The reason it took so long to show on the P&L is we were reinvesting everything into growth.

The free plan isn't a marketing gimmick. Every free user makes the paid product better because they add data, traffic patterns, and threat intelligence to the network.

We trained 500,000 developers for free through UiPath Academy before most of them even worked at companies that paid us. That's how you build a market.

We hit $100 million ARR in 18 months. Fastest in SaaS history. The secret? We built exactly what CISOs were begging for and nobody was delivering.

Forty percent of the Fortune 100 are Wiz customers. We didn't get there by being cheap. We got there by showing them risks they didn't know they had.

Our fastest-growing referral channel is one founder texting another: "just use Drata, it saved us three months." Word of mouth in the startup ecosystem is everything.

The best distribution channel for payroll software is accountants. One CPA recommends Gusto to fifty clients. That's more efficient than any sales team.

Zenefits taught me everything about what not to do. Rippling is the version built by someone who already made every possible mistake.

The give-to-get model was the key. You want to read reviews? Write one first. Every reader becomes a contributor. The content creates itself.

We bootstrapped from Columbus, Ohio to $100 million in revenue without a single dollar of Silicon Valley money. Not bad for a company that VCs said was too simple to fund.

One million sales reps use our platform. Each of them tells three colleagues. Word of mouth in sales is the most powerful GTM strategy that exists.

Every therapist we onboard means hundreds of patients who can now see someone in-network. The leverage on the supply side is enormous.

When CMS said health plans need to respond to prior auth requests in 72 hours, most plans panicked. We were the phone call they made the next morning.

Every dentist who joins Dandy becomes recurring revenue because their patients keep needing crowns. It's not a one-time sale — it's a relationship that compounds.

Big Billion Days proved that Indian consumers will shop online if you give them a reason. We did $1.4 billion in five days. India wasn't an e-commerce desert — it was an e-commerce dam waiting to break.

We hit our first-year sales target in three weeks. We had a 20,000-person waitlist. Turns out people really hated paying $300 for something that costs $5 to make.

We started in one surf shop in Encinitas. Now we're in Nordstrom, we have 50 stores, and we're expanding internationally. But the brand still feels like Encinitas. That's deliberate.

People said you can't build a billion-dollar brand on comedy. Turns out you absolutely can if the comedy is consistent, the product is real, and you never break character.

We went from 30 employees to a $13.3 billion valuation in under a year. The highs were unreal. The correction was also unreal. Both experiences teach you something important about building in crypto.

Free returns on first orders sound expensive. But the data shows that retailers who try a brand risk-free reorder 80% of the time. The free return isn't a cost — it's the best customer acquisition tool we have.

We were adding 64,000 rooms a month at our peak. People said it was too fast. They were right. Speed without quality control is just chaos with a growth chart.

We reached $1 billion in revenue faster than any mobile game in history — seven months. Fortnite took 10 months. Candy Crush took two years. Location plus nostalgia is a powerful formula.