In search of speed

16 Feb, 2025

Venture celebrates scale and speed (amongst other things). It's not surprising that the below picture has been doing round on socials - small teams scaling ARR to multiple millions in months. It's awesome to see some of these tools 1) build transparently in public and 2) find lots of paying users quickly, which says a lot about the product(s).

Harry Stebbings said in a recent post that expectations have changed. The T2D3 (triple, triple, double, double, double of ARR each year), a traditional SaaS path to $100m ARR, no longer holds. That's fine. Tech is littered with exceptions and I'm sure the investment community will conjure up some rule of thumb to capture this latest round of speed and scale.

But there is a problem in these 'tropes'. Much has been said about the quality of this ARR, churn, the defensibility of these businesses etc. I won't spend any time on this. Instead, for me, they can distort the expectations for other founders (and observers) who hold themselves to these standards and can detract from the mission. The mission can become "how can I reach $10m of ARR in [2 months] because anything slower versus others is not acceptable." It's misleading at best and distracting at worst. Forgetting that for Cursor to do what it does, it does so on the shoulders of giants (and lots of capital) of the foundation layer model companies (e.g. Anthropic).

I'm a firm believer that focus is as finite and valuable an asset as capital is. Focus on your customer, your product, your market, your journey. The nature of some products is that they take months or years to build. Some companies just take-off and others take longer. Speed of execution is just one element in building an enduring and generational company. At some point, after investors have found the next milestone to celebrate, it won't matter how quickly you got to $Xm ARR.

I remind myself that while Wiz did get to $100m in ARR in 18 months and the venture world celebrated that fact often, they also built an incredible Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) platform, one which serves more than 45% of Fortune 100 companies.