Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is maximizing egg mass per day, and you hire people who figure out how to turn gold into wealth as profitably as possible, but at some point, you run out of ways to significantly improve the magic goose pipeline.

At this point, you've stopped growing. Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema. So you start spending a lot of the money on long shot bets. Maybe try buying lots of geese to see if any lay golden eggs. You heard that somebody found a hen that lays golden eggs because of some magic beans, hire some bean farmers and see if that gets you more gold egg poultry. Jack who was the manager of goose calisthenics has really wanted a chance to grow, and he's dating your cousin, so let's put him in charge of the beans.

The only way to grow is long shot bets. Most of them will fail. All of them will be expensive. But the alternative is not growing. That can't ever happen.

> One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable.

how? the value of gold plummets the instant that the market learns that the stuff literally comes out of rear ends

The responsible alternative to not going is to return capital to your share holders who can then do the goose hunting themselves, and management should in invest their personal stock into other companies.

For very human reasons, they thing they have a better chance of finding the goose themselves.

> Not growing is completely unacceptable; it is anathema

Succinctly put and so very both unfortunate and accurate. The only other thing I can think of that grows endlessly is cancer. There’s an analogy in there if you squint hard enough.