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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale.

If you are not getting better, you are getting worse. There is no steady state.

Do things that don't scale. The most common mistake startups make is to think they should be doing things that scale from day one.

We were profitable before we went public. That wasn't an accident. We don't believe in growing at all costs.

We were spending $2,400 to acquire each customer. You can't sell a used Honda Civic at those unit economics and survive.

COVID didn't create the demand for online therapy. It revealed how massive the demand always was. We just happened to be ready.

We went from zero to 20 million customers in three years. In Brazil, that's not just growth — that's a referendum on how badly people wanted an alternative.

Every elite athlete, every CEO, every high-performer who tries the Pod becomes a customer for life. Word of mouth among overachievers is the most powerful marketing channel that exists.

Sneaker culture used to be niche. Now it's a $6 billion resale market. We didn't create the culture. We just built the infrastructure it needed.

Our average user is 25 years old, lives in a tier-2 city, and has never invested before. That's not Zerodha's customer. That's the next 100 million investors.

We added 15 million users in one year. Most of them came from cities like Jaipur, Lucknow, and Indore — not Mumbai or Bangalore. India's investing revolution is happening in places nobody is watching.

OpenAI invested in us directly. Sequoia led our Series B. We went from founding to $700 million valuation in 18 months. Legal AI isn't a niche. It's one of the biggest markets AI will ever touch.

Everyone said we were just a hair loss company. Then we added skincare. Then mental health. Then sexual health for women. Now we have 1.5 million subscribers. Still just a hair loss company?

We hit $45 million ARR in 18 months. Fastest-growing company in Y Combinator history at the time. Then ChatGPT launched and the whole category changed overnight.

We have a waitlist of 400,000 people. We didn't spend a dollar on advertising. The product is so visual — you eat something, you see the spike on your phone — that every user becomes a marketer.

India's real e-commerce penetration is 7%. Seven percent. The next decade in Indian e-commerce will look nothing like the last one. It won't be about metros. It'll be about Meerut and Madurai.

We introduced zero-commission selling. Sellers keep 100% of their margin. Everyone said we'd die. We grew 3x instead. Turns out when you stop taking from sellers, more sellers come.

Mercado Pago started as a payment button on our marketplace. Now it's the largest fintech in Latin America. It handles more transactions than most banks. The checkout button became a bank.

Business banking has $10 trillion in deposits in the US. We have a tiny fraction. But we're growing faster than any bank in the country. The incumbents aren't even trying to compete on product. That's how we win.

SVB collapsed and 10,000 startups panicked about their money. Mercury gained more customers in that one week than in any quarter before. We didn't celebrate. We just made sure the wires went through.

YC companies, a]16z portfolio companies, Sequoia portfolio companies — they all bank with us. When your customer base is the best startups in the world, word of mouth is your entire marketing budget.

I ran Midjourney out of a Discord server. That's our entire distribution. No app. No website with a fancy landing page. Just Discord. And it worked better than any growth strategy I've ever seen.

We went from founding to $2 billion valuation in six months. In France. People keep saying Europe can't do AI startups. I think we just did.

We spent more on YouTube ads than most SaaS companies spend on their entire marketing budget. People called it wasteful. Our revenue grew from $50M to $300M in two years. Wasteful?

We called it daPulse for five years. Terrible name. Then we renamed it Monday.com and growth doubled overnight. Sometimes the product is fine — the name is the problem.

We have 7 million customers in the UK. The population is 67 million. One in ten British adults has a Monzo account. For a company founded in 2015, that's not bad.

We went from 20,000 subscribers to 3 million in six months. The growth was insane. The burn rate was more insane. We were losing $20 million a month.

We hit 8 million customers. Then BaFin — the German regulator — imposed growth limits on us. They said we were growing too fast for our compliance infrastructure. Growing too fast. As a punishment.

We launched in 17 European countries simultaneously. Not one at a time. Seventeen at once. People said it was reckless. Europe's single banking passport said it was legal. We used the regulation as a growth hack.

We spent 10 years building Noom before it became an overnight success. Ten years. The app launched in 2012 and didn't go mainstream until 2019. Patience is a business strategy.

Our ads were everywhere. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, podcasts. People made fun of them. But our customer acquisition cost was $80 and the lifetime value was $400. The math worked. The jokes didn't bother us.

We started as Roman — men's health. ED medication online. Everyone thought it was a joke. Then we did $100 million in revenue and suddenly nobody was laughing.

We hit a $7 billion valuation. For a telehealth company that started selling ED pills. If you told investors that pitch in 2016, they would have walked out. But the numbers don't lie. And neither does the demand.

COVID gave us 10 years of growth in 10 weeks. We went from 2 million visits a year to 2 million visits a quarter. Overnight, every doctor in America became a telehealth doctor. Whether they liked it or not.

Shop like a billionaire — that was our Super Bowl tagline. 100 million Americans downloaded the app. Whether they keep using it depends on whether the quality holds up. That's the real test.

We spent $2 billion on advertising in our first year in the US. A Super Bowl ad. Ads on every social platform. Most companies would call that insane. We call it a customer acquisition strategy with a very specific payback period.

We process more secondhand clothing than anyone in the world. Our clean-out bags are basically a Trojan horse for changing consumer behavior.

Product-market fit is not when customers tell you they like your product. It is when they tell other people. Wealthfront grew almost entirely by word of mouth in the early years.

We have a bottom-up adoption model. One researcher on a team starts using W&B, shows their teammates the dashboards, and suddenly the whole lab is on it. We do not need a sales team for that.

LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Patrick Mahomes — they all wear Whoop. But our fastest growing segment is not pro athletes. It is regular people who want to train like them.

Our Asia business is growing 40 percent year over year. The partnerships we have built there are extraordinary.

We process billions of dollars a year and most Americans have never heard of us. That is fine. Our customers are in Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. That is where the growth is.

We have over 10 million customers and we have never spent a single rupee on advertising. Not one. Our product is our marketing. Happy customers bring more customers.

We grew Blackstone Real Estate from $300 million to over $300 billion. That is a 1,000x increase. And the opportunity set is bigger today than when we started because the world needs more of everything we invest in.

We built the largest real estate company in the world without acquiring a single competitor. We just gave agents a better deal and let them recruit each other. Turns out that is a pretty powerful model.

Every SaaS company on the planet markets Zapier for free. When Shopify says "we integrate with Zapier," that is a free ad for us. Our distribution is built into everyone else's marketing.

Usage-based pricing means our revenue grows automatically when our customers grow. We do not have to renegotiate contracts. They add more servers, we send a bigger bill. It is the most beautiful business model in SaaS.

We went from zero to the largest crypto exchange in the world in 6 months. Nothing in finance has ever scaled that fast. Not Coinbase. Not the NYSE. Nothing.

I have always believed that India is the best country to invest in. Not because I'm patriotic, but because 1.4 billion people waking up every morning wanting a better life is the most powerful economic force on Earth.

I would rather grow slowly and own everything than grow fast and owe everyone.

We rebranded from Matic to Polygon because we outgrew the original vision. We started as one sidechain. Now we're building a whole ecosystem of scaling solutions. The name needed to match the ambition.

MetaMask started as an experiment inside ConsenSys. Now it has 30 million users and is basically the front door to Web3. The best products often start as side projects that nobody takes seriously.

Warren Buffett invested $230 million in us in 2008. Everyone in China asked — who is this American? Everyone in America asked — what is BYD? Now both questions have been answered.

The referral program at Morning Brew did more for our growth than any marketing spend ever could. Word of mouth at scale is unbeatable.

We raised $2 billion and then had to lay off a third of the company. Hypergrowth is not a strategy. Sustainable growth is.

Our best marketing is when a customer's customer gets their package a day early. That is the moment that sells ShipBob.

We sponsor science YouTubers because their audiences are exactly our customers — people who are curious about how things work and want to go deeper.

The Impossible Whopper at Burger King was our moonshot moment. Millions of people tried a plant-based burger for the first time because it was right there on the menu.

We won the baristas first. When your cool local coffee shop uses Oatly, that is more powerful than any Super Bowl ad.

Chipotle proved that fast-casual works. We are proving it works for healthy food too. The market is just as big.

TikTok Shop did $20 billion in GMV. We are not just an entertainment platform anymore — we are a commerce platform.

30 million users and growing. Not bad for an app that started as a research project funded by the guy who created Twitter.

Every time Elon Musk makes X worse, our sign-ups spike. We did not plan that marketing strategy, but we will take it.

We went from zero to #1 in the App Store in 20 countries. Then usage dropped. That is what happens when your entire product is one moment per day.

We hit profitability in our rides business. Now we need to do the same for food and scooters. The playbook is the same — be cheaper and more efficient.

Early in my career, I was trying to be Gordon Gekko. That was the most expensive mistake I ever made.

Semper Vic means always conquering. The name is the strategy. Find businesses that are always conquering new markets, and hold them forever.

We raised at $8.5 billion because the market was euphoric. Now we have to earn that valuation. I would rather have the pressure than not have the capital.

We hit $100 million ARR faster than almost any enterprise security company in history. It turns out CISOs are desperate for something that actually stops BEC attacks.

If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together. If you want to do both build a conglomerate.

The hardest part of my job is turning down buildings.

The definition of value has to evolve. A company growing at 20 percent trading at 15 times earnings is a value stock whether the market calls it one or not.

We have no sales team. The product is the sales team.

We hit one million databases in under four years. Turns out developers really do not like vendor lock-in.

From 10 million daily participants to 300 million in four months. I still cannot believe those numbers when I see them.

The fastest way to spread a product is to make it useful to small groups of friends. Not the whole world. Friends first.

Profitability is not a dirty word. We proved you can grow fast and make money in India. Just not at the same time.

Growth and comfort do not coexist. You have to choose one.

We originated 58 billion dollars in mortgages in a single year. Then rates changed and the world changed with them.

We became the number one brokerage in America by volume. Now we need to become the number one in profitability.

COVID proved that virtual tours are not a nice-to-have. They are essential. Overnight our TAM exploded.

Revenue grew from 35 billion to 63 billion while we made the portfolio healthier. You do not have to choose between profit and purpose.

We have more TVL than any other L2 because developers chose us. In crypto developer adoption is everything.

We added US Treasury bonds as collateral. The purists hate it. But you cannot scale to a trillion dollars on ETH alone.

The ARB airdrop put billions of dollars in the hands of early users. That is the most effective customer acquisition program in history.

Ninety percent of Depop users are under 26. We did not target Gen Z. Gen Z found us. That is the best kind of product-market fit.

We expanded to 9 countries. We should have stayed in 3. Speed of expansion killed us not the concept.

The sales tactics were aggressive. I take responsibility. When you are growing at that speed you lose control of the details.

When you are growing at 10x per year you lose control of quality. In healthcare that is unacceptable.

We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.

Turn your wounds into wisdom.

Come for the tool, stay for the network.

Growth is easy. Profitable growth is hard. And that's what separates real businesses from subsidized experiments.

We serve over half the Fortune 100. Turns out, big companies really hate making training videos the old way.

There are over 860,000 restaurants in America. We have 120,000. The runway is long.

30 million developers use Postman. That happened with almost zero marketing spend. The product was the marketing.

We hit $500 million in ARR faster than almost any SaaS company in history. Turns out, global payroll is a big problem.

Ten million humans verified in the first year. This is the fastest-growing identity network in history.

We spent zero dollars on traditional advertising and built a $200 million brand. The product was the marketing.

We process $40 billion annually. That's still less than 10% of the global remittance market. The opportunity is massive.

18 million lives covered. 1,700 employers. Digital health that actually works at scale.

5,000 companies trust us with their people data. That trust is earned one great experience at a time.

In six months we went from a demo to a product that millions of people use. AI moves at a different speed.

300 games in our pipeline. One breakout hit changes everything for blockchain gaming.

Stripe acquiring us was the best outcome imaginable. Now we have the resources to build payments infrastructure for all of Africa.

Quick commerce — delivering groceries in 10 minutes — is growing faster than food delivery. Blinkit was our best acquisition.

India's smartphone penetration is still growing. Every new smartphone user is a potential Dream11 user.

200 million users playing fantasy sports during every IPL match. That's not a feature. That's a cultural movement.

DTC-only was a ceiling. Going into Whole Foods and Target gave us the scale we needed.

I was making smoothie cups in my apartment. Now we're in Walmart. The journey has been wild.

1.4 billion Indians are discovering the convenience of delivery. We're just getting started.

Expanding to Spain and Belgium proved our model works beyond France. Next: all of Europe.

4 million members use Current. In a market with 50 neobanks, that means our product is working.

$700 million in revenue selling activewear. Not bad for a company that people said was just a celebrity cash grab.

100+ retail stores. Everyone said DTC brands can't do physical retail. We proved them wrong.

We've pivoted multiple times — genetic testing, COVID testing, cancer screening. Each time toward a bigger problem.

Teen banking accounts are our trojan horse. Families sign up together. One account becomes three.

Free P2P transfers build the habit. Cross-border payments and business services build the business.

5 million users across 7 African countries. And we're just scratching the surface.

700,000 members and €500 million in revenue. We proved digital insurance works in Europe.

Viral marketing was born from Hotmail. Every email that went out was an advertisement for free email.

Suffering is the great teacher. The moments that break you are the moments that make you.

My 2014 suspension was the worst year of my life and the best thing that ever happened to me.

One million customers in five days. We didn't advertise — we were already in everyone's phone.

Tata didn't buy us to shut us down. They bought us because online grocery in India is just starting.

Outspend competitors on rider subsidies until they quit. Then improve economics as the monopoly.

100 million monthly active users. The most downloaded shopping app on Earth. Then quality caught up with us.

Fastest European unicorn ever — zero to $1 billion in 9 months. Then the fastest decline.

FarmVille reached 83 million monthly players in months. No game in history had grown that fast.

Usage surged 3,400% in the first weeks of the pandemic. Then patients went back to their actual doctors.

A hundred million customers chose us. Not because we had the biggest marketing budget, but because their old bank was treating them like garbage.

The best opportunities are in markets where great entrepreneurs meet massive populations coming online for the first time.

I was employee number one at PayPal. I helped create the referral program that paid people $10 to sign up. It cost us millions and was worth billions.

Responsible innovation is not a constraint. It's a competitive advantage. Companies that make things better grow faster.

Demonetization turned us from a startup into a national utility overnight. When 86% of cash disappears, digital payments become oxygen.

My DUI arrests were the worst moments of my life. They were also the moments that finally forced me to ask for help.

The referral program built Morning Brew. We gave people a reason to share — real rewards for real growth.

Failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of success. Every year I failed in the playoffs, I learned something I used to win the championship.

Behance proved that if you build something essential for a community, the community will carry you. Creatives carried Behance to Adobe.

If your net revenue retention is above 120%, you can screw up almost everything else and still build a big company.

Net revenue retention above 130% means your existing customers grow faster than new customers leave. That’s a machine.

At Uber, I learned that growth isn’t about tricks. It’s about building a product so good that people tell their friends.

Thrive taught me to invest in companies where the product is so good that sales teams are almost unnecessary. Pull, not push.

The hardest part of any marketplace is getting to critical mass. After that, the network effects do the work for you.

Clubhouse taught me that viral growth without retention is just a bubble. The cold start problem has a sequel: the retention problem.

If your people are not growing, your company is not growing. It is that simple.

We grew from zero to thousands of customers by solving one problem really well. Outbound recruiting was broken and nobody was fixing it.

Latin America is the most exciting retail market in the world. A billion people who want better lives.

I would rather be a company that survives 100 years than one that grows 100% in a year.

Spend less than you earn. Reinvest profits. Grow at a pace that your own cash flow supports. It is that simple.

We've served over 25 million people. Most of them had never worked with a lawyer before us.

The Ranbaxy acquisition was the hardest thing I have ever done. But the best investments are never easy.

We insured 90 million Indians in six years without a single agent. The industry said it was impossible.

9 million customers in 5 years. That's 15% of South Africa's population. Every other neobank in the world can learn from our kiosk model.

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. That's how you grow.

India adds a new Germany in GDP every few years. Building capacity for that growth is the simplest investment thesis in the world.

One ship. Then two. Then ten. Then a hundred. The formula has not changed in fifty years.

I am still learning. The day I stop learning is the day I should stop working.

Evergrande's development is the development of China itself. Where China goes, Evergrande goes.

The question is not whether we can grow. The question is whether we can grow responsibly.

Asia's growth story is not just beginning — it's accelerating. The question is whether you're positioned to capture it.

China's urbanization is the greatest economic story of our generation. SHKP will be part of that story.

India will need 700 to 800 million square feet of Grade-A office space over the next decade. We are building for that future.

China's urbanization will create demand for quality housing that the market has never seen. We are building for a country that is still becoming.

The best products do not need advertising. They spread because people genuinely love them and tell their friends.

Abandon anything about your life and habits that might be holding you back. Learn what you are afraid of and do it.

The idea that you have to fail to learn is overrated. You can also learn by succeeding — and then watching what breaks.

Speed is everything in business. If you're not moving fast, someone else is.

India is a story of resilience and growth. Whatever short-term challenges we face, the long-term picture is absolutely clear.

Growth means nothing if it costs you the thing that made you great in the first place.

I never wanted to be the biggest. I wanted to be the best. The size came because we kept doing the work right.

The next five years plan is even bigger. I want more employees. We are entering new mega projects.

China was always the prize. As families grew richer, they would want a trusted brand of cooking oil.

Somehow, we have come to equate profitability with a lack of ambition.

The next billion customers are in Africa and Asia, not Silicon Valley.

In four years, private credit will be double the size it is today.

The new capital will be used to grow our services in Japan and to expand into the United States and Europe.

Money is made by looking through the windshield, not the rearview mirror.

Do not build one product. Build an ecosystem where every service makes the others stronger.

Puzzle & Dragons proved one great product can change everything overnight.

The future for us is outside Korea. A market of fifty million people is not enough.

Do not be afraid to invest outside your own country. Growth does not stop at the border.

At first, 70% of the purchase for our portfolios was from Jakarta. However, in 2013, the transaction moved to outside Jakarta. This is how we see the potential.

Before 2014, when I travelled to Indonesia or Vietnam for a conference, there would always be a translator. Now, you do not need one.

We expect even faster growth for the rest of the year, while also remaining committed to our profitability goals.

Crypto went from nothing to $3.4 trillion in market cap on the back of retail interest, but the only way for this asset class to keep growing is by attracting institutional capital.