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In 2013, Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote one of his most famous essays called ā Do things that donāt scaleā.
The basic idea is that while software companies are valuable because they are scaleable, you sometimes counterintuitively need to do things that explicitly donāt scale to make your company take off. One of the examples he gives is of Airbnb going door-to-door to recruit hosts for the platform.
āActually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.ā