One immediate issue I see with slow-growth companies is that if all companies grow slowly, that puts a cap on the maximum growth of the overall economy.
The other thing we in the software world mustn't forget is that we have marginal costs of approximately zero (or should I say picodollars?), which makes smaller companies disproportionally more competitive. The only advantage of being big in software is bigger leverage (which is usually in direct competition with agility) whereas elsewhere economies of scale are pronounced.
And regarding "number of companies which will ultimately become big founded at given dates":
I'd love to see some numbers on companies that are big but got there slowly. I suspect it doesn't happen, leaving aside artificially competition-stifled markets such as state-blessed monopolies. Given the nature of exponential growth, I'd be surprised if any of those Global Fortune 500 had no period of fast growth.
Slow growth is also likely to be correlated to inability to react to disruption. So companies in <high-growth country> would necessarily out-compete companies in <steady-growth country> in a free, globalised market economy.
if all companies grow slowly, that puts a cap on the maximum growth of the overall economy.
Yes, but not a meaningful one. For the purposes of this discussion, "slow growth" is anything under 100% per year.
I'd love to see some numbers on companies that are big but got there slowly. I suspect it doesn't happen
Interesting. I don't have any data, and I'm failing at finding any right now, but I think of Coca-Cola as being a company which reached its current size primarily through steady growth. I'm sure there are large pharmaceutical and chemical companies which have had slow growth curves -- while any one product may have a sharp growth curve, the company as a whole won't. Insurance companies and banks also tend to grow slowly, and of course Berkshire Hathaway is an example, with a highest ever Y/Y growth rate of 59.3%.
I suspect there's a certain amount of observation bias: Companies which grow slowly are boring, so we don't think about them.
All good points. I tried to find some useful data online, but I was surprised how hard it is to find a graph of revenue of a publicly traded company. All sorts of other metrics are available, just not revenue and profit. (let alone inflation-adjusted)
The other thing we in the software world mustn't forget is that we have marginal costs of approximately zero (or should I say picodollars?), which makes smaller companies disproportionally more competitive. The only advantage of being big in software is bigger leverage (which is usually in direct competition with agility) whereas elsewhere economies of scale are pronounced.
And regarding "number of companies which will ultimately become big founded at given dates":
I'd love to see some numbers on companies that are big but got there slowly. I suspect it doesn't happen, leaving aside artificially competition-stifled markets such as state-blessed monopolies. Given the nature of exponential growth, I'd be surprised if any of those Global Fortune 500 had no period of fast growth.
Slow growth is also likely to be correlated to inability to react to disruption. So companies in <high-growth country> would necessarily out-compete companies in <steady-growth country> in a free, globalised market economy.