Comment by zomglings
2 years ago
They do - they just have to have had larger successes.
"Founding X" doesn't count for shit.
Being part of a team that built a hugely successful product teaches you a lot - it teaches you about the counterintuitive dynamics of superlinear growth. That is a very important mindset to bring to the table if you want to create a successful VC-funded startup.
I had to look up "superlinear growth" because I've never seen that term used under posts with VC related topics. If you're as confused as me, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about this last October (figures):
http://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
tl:dr: Just make a product that's so cool it'll go viral in it's respective market.
so basically exponential but fancier.
The reason I don't use the world exponential, is that superlinear growth in a product is generally not exponential.
It is usually at best quadratic because there is some kind of network effect at play - the number of edges in a complete graph with `n` vertices is `n(n-1)/2`.
The point is that the value of your product to your users should increase with the number of users OR the marginal cost to you of maintaining the product should decrease with the number of users.
"Superlinear" captures that more effectively than "exponential".
2 replies →
Less specific than exponential which also makes it more achievable. More positive than nonlinear.