Investors advising early-stage teams should avoid pushing for growth ahead of product/market fit. As an industry, we all know that this ends in disaster, yet the pressure for premature growth is still all too common. Startups need time and space to find their fit and launch the right way.

I’ve seen many companies make the mistake of working on growth prior to nailing product-market fit. I think this mistake becomes even more common in an environment where there’s rampant VC funding, so while some of the discipline here is useful early on, I’d really encourage founders to be laser-focused on finding that fit before iterating on... See more

A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with ‘growth hacking’. That sort of works—at least, it will fool investors for awhile until they start digging into retention numbers—but eventually the music stops.

One result of this past tech cycle was a view that companies needed to build hyper complex ponzi schemes of ambition in order to accumulate capital and be valued. This led to a variety of shooting stars that never realized their main goal.

Another view was an insane amount of value ascribed to hyper-narrow features masquerading as companies, leading... See more