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But he's right: every successful startup in history is cancer. Deliberately so: they grow huge very, very quickly. It's steroids. The trick with any great star
by ealexhudson 9y ago
But he's right: every successful startup in history is cancer. Deliberately so: they grow huge very, very quickly. It's steroids.
The trick with any great start up is how to get out of the "aggressive growth without revenue" stage. Some (very few) keep the growth but aggressively grow revenue and become self-sustaining. Others dial down the growth at a certain stage, and revenue increases to match, and they're self-sustaining.
The point is you have to become sustainable. Most start-ups flare out badly. You cannot change over-night from "growth like cancer" to "stable and flat". You need some way to switch and it takes time.
- openasocket 9y agoBut, according to the table, they have more revenue than expenses and revenue is growing just as fast if not faster than expenses.
- akolbe 9y agoYes, and that revenue comes from begging banners that more often than not create the - entirely false - impression that if people don't donate, Wikipedia will blink out of existence. In the early days, when almost everything was volunteer-run, hosting costs were indeed Wikipedia's main expense (as explained in that old quote from Jimmy Wales). These days, hosting amounts to about 2% of expenses, and most of the rest goes to staff costs (incl. about two dozen people in fundraising alone). Meanwhile, most of the value - the actual content - is contributed by unpaid volunteers. The paid staff have absolutely nothing to do with it. Nobody minded working for free when there was just enough money to cover hosting costs. Now, however, there is an influx of $100 million in donations a year, and none of that benefits the average contributor, the people actually writing Wikipedia. That grates a little, much like in the monkey fairness experiment (Google it if you're unfamiliar with it).