Technology

This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they're terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more "innovation" (aka venture capital). It's all great they'll lose wealth.

The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven't expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.

A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they're basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak's fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.

So the real lesson is not so much infinite growth like these tech CEOs believe in, the lesson is adaptability to a changing world and changing technology, which costs money in the form of research, development, and risk taking trying to set up production on products you're not sure will sell, but might replace your current offerings.

At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go?

Ooh, I know:

• Charge more (for less)
• Autocannibalize (layoffs)

I don't even have an MBA, can you believe that?

Let me preface this by saying I'm pretty anticapitalist, but I think the idea is that you create a new product or expand into a new industry. You can maintain growth for a long time that way.