[EDIT: Accidentally posted in wrong place] I guess I'm unconvinced that using the top 5 or 10 consumer Internet startups is a good sample. But I take your poin

[EDIT: Accidentally posted in wrong place] I guess I'm unconvinced that using the top 5 or 10 consumer Internet startups is a good sample. But I take your point about arguing, and I'll poke around for some reliable data. EDIT: So I looked at the actual Kauffman survey that everyone keeps referring to [1] to see how they selected the participants. The study was done in 2008, and here's how they selected the tech companies they surveyed: To answer these questions, we surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 engineering and technology companies established from 1995 through 2005. These companies, identified from an existing dataset of corporate records in Dun & Bradstreet’s Million Dollar Database, have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees. It seems then that the worst-case scenario here would be a company that's 13 years old and has $1m in sales. If you assume a starting revenue of $1000 / month that you mentioned in your recent essay, that's a weekly growth rate of 0.66%, which is pretty anemic by the standards you set out. On the other hand, if you assume that the average company in the survey is eight years old instead of 13, and that they have $5m in annual sales, the weekly growth rate climbs to 1.46%. Still a far cry from 5% weekly growth, but then 5% weekly growth for eight years isn't even remotely possible. 1. http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_042908.pdf http://sites.kauffman.org/pdf/Education_Tech_Ent_042908.pdf