The Era of Gentle Deceleration is DEAD! #shorts

Name: The Era of Gentle Deceleration is DEAD! #shorts
Uploaded: 2026-04-03T10:19:23+00:00
Duration: 1 min 16 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this YouTube short, Jason M. Lemkin declares that the period of "gentle deceleration"—where investors tolerated modestly slowing revenue growth—is…

3 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:16

In this YouTube short, Jason M. Lemkin declares that the period of "gentle deceleration"—where investors tolerated modestly slowing revenue growth—is over. He argues that both public and private markets now demand clear, high‑single‑digit or double‑digit acceleration, especially for SaaS and cloud‑focused companies. Lemkin uses Wix as a case study, noting that a $100 million investment from Base44 is insufficient to offset flat or declining core customer counts; he estimates Wix would need $500‑$600 million in incremental revenue to meaningfully shift its growth trajectory. He questions when venture investors should abandon portfolios that fail to accelerate. A contrasting viewpoint from a co‑speaker highlights that mature firms like CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and Google can sustain 13‑25% growth and still be viewed positively, suggesting that scale changes the growth benchmark. Lemkin concludes that market sentiment has become brutally unforgiving of any slowdown, marking the end of the gentle deceleration era.

Chapters

It's just the era of gentle deceleration has ended. Now the truth is you've got to be cloud— it's not just Pounder, you got to be Cloudflare or better. And so I wouldn't want to be running Wix because $100 million from Base44, it's great and it shows you can cross-sell, right? And it shows a lot of new things, but, uh, but their, their, their larger customer count is flat to down. So they've got the gravity of the decline of the core business, like they've got to get back to so much growth that $100 million just, it's not enough. It's not enough. And we, we could, Rory could help trail out the math, but I think Base44, and there's some cannibalization there, it's gotta be doing $500, $600 million to move the needle for Wix with its core growth decelerating. It's just so hard. And you know, for, and for startups, you know, you gotta start wondering this year when you should just give up on your portfolio if they're not accelerating. At what point do you just give up? Because if the public markets won't tolerate gentle deceleration, right, how will the private markets tolerate it, right? It's just the era of gentle deceleration has ended. It's dead. We didn't think it was such a great period, '22 to '25, but it was pretty nice that gentle deceleration was tolerable.
Good push for that, because let's take CrowdStrike, right? Slight deceleration, '27 to guidance of '23. 27% revenue growth, guidance of 23%. They'll probably beat that by 2%. It's okay to grow 25% when you have scale. I mean, Microsoft and Google are all growing at 13%, right? So you just have to be objective. When you have enough scale, 25% is enough to matter, right? Not everything's going to accelerate all the time, Jason, because turns out—
No, but the markets have been brutal this year. And I think it's not that you're wrong analytically or empirically, but the markets have given up on folks not accelerating. They've just entirely abandoned it.
What they've done is they've said, for 3 years, I thought it was temporary and now I recognize it's permanent. And now I'm going to value based on this growth rate, take a hit off you for technical obsolescence and the terminal value, take another hit off you for free cash flow, and I'm going to give you 8 or 9 times revenue— EBITDA revenues. That was sweet that I said that, wasn't it? I mean, so they've all corrected to fundamentally what they're worth with no pixie dust.