In retrospect you see the path of how a company got huge as if it were a foregone conclusion, but the individual choices were not necessarily made in service of

In retrospect you see the path of how a company got huge as if it were a foregone conclusion, but the individual choices were not necessarily made in service of a grand vision. This. To support your statement, it's worth looking into how many of the large companies today started out large -- and how many started out small and incrementally built up. The majority of successful large businesses started small. That isn't to say they didn't take loans or types of investment to grow faster, once they already had a steady revenue base underneath them. But few succeeding in the jump from zero to 1000 headcount with Other People's Money. Around the first dotcom boom, one of the characteristics of the destined-to-fail companies was that they tried to copy big businesses "are" like instead of emulating what those big businesses were like when they were small and starting out. Fancy offices, game rooms, huge perks, lots of headcount was a chief indicator of future doom. A friend of mine played Fucked Company Bingo and used to bet on which companies would fail spectacularly based solely on whether or not they had press/web site touting their foosball table. She did extraordinarily well in the office pool, I've heard. IMO, it's all happening again. The poet Basho once wrote, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." For startups, perhaps we should amend that to "Do not seek to copy what your target business is doing now. Seek what they sought when they began."