Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Rapid growth causes success disasters

12 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this short talk, Lenny Rachitsky introduces the concept of “success disasters,” the paradox where a company’s rapid growth creates a cascade of operational and emotional problems despite outwardly positive performance metrics. He explains that at hyper‑growing firms like Facebook, Uber, and DoorDash, the very success of scaling leads to constant firefighting across the three core growth levers—acquisition, activation, and monetization. While dashboards show green, upward‑trending charts, teams are overwhelmed by urgent issues, making the experience both painful and oddly humorous. Rachitsky urges listeners to step back, recognize the privilege of having such problems, and adopt a broader perspective on growth challenges.

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Roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters. And that is where things have gone so well that other things are breaking. And I think anyone who's worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth, you think Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on, they understand this viscerally where scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges. Each of those categories on acquisition, on activation, on monetization, there's just a ton of firefighting jumping from one urgent thing to another. And it's often extremely painful and it's funny. Because all the charts are like green and like fully up into the right. It can be quite tough emotionally still. And so you need to sort of step back and just realize like we're very lucky to have these problems.