> A couple days later I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate.

This is such a weird statement to see. The idea that a startup founder whose company is growing at 93% month-over-month has a net worth growing at the same rate is just so logically wrong that it's bizarre to see someone stating this.

Even putting aside the fact that "growth" can be tracked by various metrics (revenue, customers, registered users, etc.), the idea that any given "growth" rate tracks 1:1 to the paper valuation of illiquid equity in an early-stage private company is so naive to be silly.

> And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.

Delve, anyone? Startups can lie, cheat and steal, and their customers "love" them until they find out they've been duped. And let's not forget that more than a few have been accused of lying about how much "love" they really have (by misrepresenting their traction). Fake it until you raise it.

Also, this reasoning is very narrow. A company's customers might love it because it allows them to benefit from something that has external costs that disadvantage other groups, if not society at large. Cheap outsourced labor, regulatory capture, network/monopoly rents, tax shenanigans, etc.

A lot of companies also try to hack referrals, which sometimes involves using dubious tactics to get users/customers to sign up for something under questionable pretenses. In other words, people recommend products and services to their friends not solely because they love them but because they're given a personal incentive to. These can be really effective even when it's pretty obvious people are doing something that won't benefit their friends.