The article clearly isn't meant to be mathematically correct: you are being over-rigorous in your criticism. From the article: Businesses generally grow foll

The article clearly isn't meant to be mathematically correct: you are being over-rigorous in your criticism. From the article: Businesses generally grow following a few patterns. They generally have some TAM to saturate and saturate the TAM at some rate. This rate can be vaguely linear, what I call O(n), or vaguely superlinear, what I call O(n²). The reason I borrow the asymptotic notation is because it implies the growth rate is an upper bound (best case scenario) and generalizes away specific constant factors and sums. The analogy breaks down when you force n or n² imply something numerically specific about your growth rate, or introduce functions with different growth rates like logs or exponentials. For now we will (somewhat unprincipledly) stick with two sole classes. Article would be better using something like O(linear) and O(≫linear). The big O notation is a useful and memorable metaphor, but the n squared is really confusing. The article also doesn't use Unicode for the notation - which fucks usability (e.g. I used screenshot OCR and reedited).