When a founder tells me how fast they intend to scale, I listen for a very specific thing: whether speed is the strategy or the byproduct. If speed is the strategy, I usually lose interest quickly, and I want to explain why without sounding like I am against ambition. I am not. I am against fragility dressed up as ambition.
Speed hides the cracks
Rapid scale is wonderful at concealing whether a business actually works. Pour enough fuel on anything and it produces a flame; the question is whether there is a fire underneath or just fuel. Growth-at-all-costs postpones that question — often until the money runs out and the answer arrives all at once.
The businesses I have built and the ones I most respect were, in their early years, almost boringly patient. They earned the right to grow by first proving they should. A slower start is not a lack of ambition. It is ambition with a longer memory.
Anything worth building compounds. And compounding punishes the impatient.
The decade lens
Ask a founder what they want the business to be in ten years and you learn everything. The hurried founder cannot really answer; ten years is invisible to them because they are optimising for the next round, the next headline, the next exit. The durable founder answers easily, because the ten-year picture is the whole point and the speed is just how fast the foundation happens to allow.
I back the second kind. Not because they are slower — often they aren’t, in the end — but because they are building something that would survive me being wrong about the timing. That is the only kind of thing worth a decade of anyone’s life.