Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

Is chasing 10x growth the real startup killer?

14 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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Precursor Ventures argues that the startup culture expectation of rapid 10x growth (e.g., hitting $10M ARR quickly) is unrealistic and harmful. The speaker praises honesty about mistakes—citing "Roy"—and urges founders not to chase sensational growth narratives from social media; launch marketing can create ephemeral attention that doesn't persist into sustainable revenue.

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You have to go to 10 million in ARR in two hours or your company sucks. That's just not normal. And we, we don't talk enough about what happens on the other side of these stories. And I think it takes a lot of courage to say what Roy said and to admit the truth, which was like, hey, I made, I made a miscalculation. We did a great job on launch marketing. We shouldn't have talked about revenue and that the energy and attention we attracted at launch. The answer is it didn't persist. And so I feel like lately I've been trying to spend more of my time encouraging startups to not chase whatever thing it that they read on X or heard about. This company. Did this.