An investor explains why growth alone doesn't impress anymore. Companies growing 100% while losing 150% won't convince anyone they're viable. Rising customer-acquisition costs and market headwinds are making the math harder.
And so not all businesses are, have proven that that is sort of their terminal state. And so investors, I think, got a little bit weary of like, well, when, when do I get to see the returns? When do I get to see what your actual cash flow is? And it's not enough to just keep telling me that that's a, that's going to be in five or ten years from now. I want to understand, you know, can you guys, can your company do that and can you generate those returns? So that was the transition we basically went through the past couple of years, which is if you're growing 100% a year, but you're losing 150% or 100% or even 50%, then you haven't really proven you have a fundamentally economically viable platform franchise. And then there's one other thing, which is at some point, your market has certain growth headwinds that just cause your growth to slow down, and then there's some efficacy loss where you're just spending too much to acquire customers or you're just pushing a rock up a hill in a market environment.
