> I'm not sure any company can avoid this fate long term if they need to keep growing.
I wonder why “if they need to keep growing” is so important to literally everyone? I’d die for a meaningful business that predictably spit out cash due to extreme customer loyalty. Why did growth itself become the prize everyone reaches for?
>Not all companies need growth in order to survive, or to thrive.
If your company isn't growing but the market is, your company is shrinking. If your company isn't growing and the market isn't growing, how long will that market last? How many markets are stable over decades?
> There are limited resources so defining success on growth will eventually lead to a point of no more growth and no longer be successful by a growth definition.
Growth depends on resources AND technology. Its quite possible to have growth without any change in resourcing.
> Comparing to GDP gets tricky. Is GDP growing due to actual output growth and wealth generation or due to inflation?
It doesn't make a difference. In this case we are definitely talking nominal growth.
My bottom line would be that a business would generally(!) not be classed as successful if it is not growing.
Of course there are other factors that might make a stationary business considered a success.
“Have they grown to the point that the huge profits from web search aren't enough to sustain them or something?”
The demand of never ending exponential growth pretty much dooms a public company to squeeze money from everything. You can have yearly double digit growth while you are small by increasing your market share but once you get big and already dominate the market, where can you get more profits at the scale you need it?
> Why do sales always need to grow, why sustaining is not enough?
I wonder this often myself too. It's unorthodox, but I wish more companies focused on staying sustainable rather than trying to grow continuously (or making growth the only goal of the company). A good book on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...
>Sure. When I say growth, I mean "make more money this year than you did the year before".
If I understand tomkarlo's point correctly, he's saying that you don't have to make more money year to year in order to have a viable business. Rather, you simply need to keep expenses low enough to manage a respectable profit for your investors. That profit need not necessarily grow year to year for investors to find it worth holding.
Of course, valuations will be made completely differently for such a company, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.
"It is likely that they want to grow faster than their current cash flow would allow - in fact, they may need to do this in order to survive in the long term."
But what is growth? Making more money? More users? Happier users?
After attaining profitability I wish companies would focus on making existing users happy, instead of making more money by any means necessary. If they did that then more users + more money would follow naturally.
The sibling comment about cancer is so apt. When does "growth" become cancerous?
The word "profitable" covers wide range of possible outcomes.
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