First: Product Market Fit Second: Monetization Third: Growth Culture isn't even in the Top 3 and might not even be in the Top 5 * One very important Caveat

First: Product Market Fit Second: Monetization Third: Growth Culture isn't even in the Top 3 and might not even be in the Top 5 * One very important Caveat In today's zero interest rate, Fed printing press environment where money is DESPERATE for any kind of return Growth will sometimes trump Monetization and even Product Market Fit VCs will focus on Growth above all else because with Growth you can raise enough money to 'brute force' Product Market Fit Culture, as opposed to what all the 'gurus' and 'politically correct people' say and pretend is not as important as any of the above You can see a lot of successful companies that don't necessarily have very good culture Culture is something that will matter 10 to 20 years down the line once you're a big or very big company If you don't have Product Market Fit, you won't survive If you don't have good monetization/profitability you won't last very long (unless Product Market Fit and/or growth is massive) If you don't have Growth, then you will always remain small/much smaller than you could be One thing a lot of people in US/UK/Canada (have lived in all 3 countries) believe VERY STRONGLY IN and which people from China/India/Africa (worked with all; non work friends from all places) don't believe in AT ALL is this Western Dream State of a company also being focused on saving pandas and bald eagles and world peace It's almost as if in the West it's not enough to be successful you also have to A) Pretend you never intended to be successful. It was a happy byproduct of wanting to make the world a better place B) Start talking non stop about how much you will donate to charity C) Start saying 'it was all luck' and 'not the better people won' etc * This is also reflected in a different way In the West people are super likely to be made a fool of by a company pretending to be virtuous Google and Facebook are good examples They work so hard to pretend all their unethical steps are 'mistakes' or 'one off instances' people in the West just buy it hook, line and sinker things like: Even after we turned off the setting to track location, Google was still tracking it things like: Instagram had camera on all the time, it was just a bug and had nothing to do with ad targeting and spying * For all the talk of China and INdia and South East Asia and Africa being corrupt companies like this are very quickly identified to be scum and taken down, sometimes even by the Government Basically, the people who control Europe and US are very, very good at making it seem all magical fantasy land Snowden is a good example. He's basically being treated as if HE was the one doing all the spying and illegal surveillance