growth Archives - Startup Economist

Why Nobody Understands Startup Growth

Wednesday, 30 July 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Startups don’t grow like businesses. Not in the traditional sense. They don’t scale by adding headcount, expanding inventory, or renting more retail space. They grow by discovering, and then systematically proving, a revenue-generating system that works before it collapses. And yet, here we are, in 2025, with startup advisors, development organizations, investors, and even policymakers

Published in Insights / Research, Startup Ecosystems, Startups

34 Comments

Why AI Agents Will Build the Next Wave of Startups: The Death of Marketing Teams

Thursday, 05 December 2024 by Paul O'Brien

For decades, startup experienced professionals, researchers, and classically trained marketers, have been reinforcing as best we can that it is well established, proven, and certain, that marketing (aside from team) is the single greatest cause of a startup’s success or failure. We’ve been trying to explain this for the sake of the economy, of founders,

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Published in AI, Startups

16 Comments

Entrepreneurs Struggle Beyond Startup

Tuesday, 08 June 2021 by Paul O'Brien

Highly risk tolerant and constantly fixated on doing things better, entrepreneurs tend not to be found running companies. That’s not remotely a knock against entrepreneurs. Operating a company is a management skillset, it’s operational, it’s project based, it’s plan and execute…. and these are skillsets that, while valuable to a founder, are not typically consistent

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Published in Startups

38 Comments

Is ‘Blitzscaling’ Choking Innovation – And Wasting Money?

Thursday, 11 July 2019 by Paul O'Brien

WIRED and Executive in Residence and faculty member at Columbia Business School, Leonard Sherman, published a great look today at the implication of substantial rounds of investment going into young companies. The idea behind the intent, known as Blitzscaling, is to fuel such innovations substantially enough that they can establish a global market share and

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Published in Startups

19 Comments

Growth Hacking for Investors

Sunday, 27 November 2016 by Paul O'Brien

I had the honor of sharing, with Austin Pre-Accelerator DivInc, some thoughts about Growth Hacking. The startup program fostering diversity in tech asked for some insight to the idea of growth hacking and I’ll admit, I struggled with how to make an hour talk about such a thing relevant to startup founders. Luckily, I find myself in

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Published in Startups

No Comments

The Tale of Two Founders

Tuesday, 24 March 2015 by Paul O'Brien

Yesterday, famed New York Times cartoonist Kaamran Hafeez featured a sketch that has garnered quite a bit of attention in the startup community. Implied by one “faction” (a term I’m using not to be critical but to distinguish) to offer a tongue-in-cheek jab at founders and investors who arguably embrace market share and scalability over

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Published in Startups

2 Comments

Entre to the Internet; Marketing for Startups

Thursday, 17 July 2014 by Paul O'Brien

Thanks to the incredible startup program at Houston’s Rice University, I’ve had a chance to update a popular, but out of date, post about Startup Marketing. In the process, I had a chance to meet the exceptional entrepreneurs in this year’s Owlspark program. While not too dissimilar from that startup marketing post, this update touches