If You Aren't Growing, Are You Dying?

The guys talk dissect the "If you're not growing you're dying" aphorism and debate if it has merits or if it should be discarded into the dustbin of history. Do entrepreneurs need to have a winner take all mindset or is it acceptable to be a minor player in a large market? Let's get philosophical on this episode of FounderQuest!

Full transcript:
Josh:               00:00          I just... I think that Ben could really pull off like a massive... Like if you had a gigantic, like foot long beard or something. I think you could pull it off.

Ben:                00:11          I could pull off the following.

Starr:              00:12          Like one of those people who moved to California for the gold rush.

Josh:               00:15          Wouldn't he look amazing?

Announcer:          00:17          It's like Steve Jobs and the dude had triplets and they built an app. This is FounderQuest.

Starr:              00:26          If you have one of those cabins and tell people to get away from it.

Josh:               00:29          Like the Unabomber. So I enabled... What is it called? Tweet Delete or something like that? I think you did this too Starr but it deletes all your tweets like beyond a certain timeframe or date.

Starr:              00:48          Yeah.

Josh:               00:49          So now I only have the last year of tweets on my Twitter account.

Starr:              00:55          That's good. So people can't like blackmail you with your own words.

Josh:               00:59          Yeah. They can't like go back to like 2008 and dig up you know, whatever I was saying back then.

Ben:                01:06          I have kind of mixed feelings about that. I mean I like the idea of preserving that history even if it's stupid. I don't know. I guess maybe you could have this goal of tweeting such that your family at your funeral service they just get up and read your tweets your entire life.

Josh:               01:26          I don't know about that. I'm not sure that has... I'm not sure that's how it works.

Ben:                01:32          I mean, they can read the date stamp like March 4th, 2004. Pooping.

Starr:              01:41          My thought on the whole thing is that like what good is it doing anybody to have like my ancient tweets out there? Like the only good is doing anybody is people who are like harvesting that data. And I know people have already harvested it but why leave it out there? Like nobody's going back and reading an old tweet of mine and being like, "Oh, that was insightful."

Josh:               02:01          You mean you... But you don't want to quote tweet yourself from like 10 years ago just to show everyone how right you still are or you were back then or whatever?

Starr:              02:10          Yeah, I don't know. I'm not I don't think that's myself.

Josh:               02:16          Sorry, I totally like blew up your train of thought.

Starr:              02:20          It's okay. There wasn't much of train of thought. It's more like one of those, you know the things like, "Oh brother Where Art Thou?" where they sort of like pump up and down? That's like well platform. They always have them in cartoons?

Josh:               02:32          Yeah.

Starr:              02:33          Yeah. It's like that. That was like the train. That's my train.

Josh:               02:37          Just like the maintenance crew.

Starr:              02:40          Yeah. Oh, so today I think we're going to talk about something that was on Twitter. Justin Jackson, who is at Transistor FM, was in a conversation on Twitter with somebody about this topic of if you're not growing, you're dying. And I think somebody else brought this sort of quote out. Like we all heard this. This is sort of a little aphorism that makes its way around.

Starr:              03:03          And people say... Its one of the things that people say without thinking about too much. And Justin, I think disagreed a little bit with us and was like, "Well, at Transistor, maybe that's not the case." So I think we're going to talk a little bit about that today. And just see where the conversation goes.

Ben:                03:20          I think the danger when it comes to the growth mindset of like, "I have to grow for growth's sake." I think that's where it gets dangerous. And I think that's where a lot of people who reject the whole VC funded path. Because they don't want to have that scenario where they have to grow, like at an extreme rate, or else they just go bust. Like the go big or go home thing. I think-

Starr:              03:44          So you're saying that like there's different pathways, right? There's like this VC funded pathway. And so you're saying like if... The VC funded pathway if you're not like having major growth and you are effectively sort of dying? Is that what you're saying?

Ben:                03:59          Yeah, I think they want you to die if you're not having that spectacular growth so they can focus on something that is having that spectacular growth.

Starr:              04:04          Whereas like a little company like ours like, what does that even mean?

Josh:               04:09          In a regular business?

Ben:                04:10          Yeah. I mean, you may not even be able to handle that spectacular growth. You just are... I don't know if you've read that book Company of One? Fantastic read, if you haven't had a chance to read it.

Starr:              04:20          No. I haven't.

Josh:               04:21          I haven't either.

Ben:                04:22          Yeah. He talks about the same concept. Like he's not interested in running t...