Should investors expect every portfolio company to grow fast, or accept slow-burning ones?

Harry Stebbings · Aug 25, 2025 · hedged

The classic SaaS 'triple triple double double' growth arc is no longer enough, and investors may have misled founders by teaching it as the standard

24:36 20VC: Do Margins Matter in AI? | Is Defensibility Gone For Good? | Is Vertical SaaS Dead in a World of AI | What SaaS Rules Are BS and No Longer Apply in a World of AI | The Future of Venture: Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS with Byron Deeter

Harry Stebbings · Feb 2, 2026

Growth expectations have inflated to the point that going from $1M to $5M in revenue, once impressive, no longer attracts large funds at the B or C round

He is meeting such companies and knows he won't get a good next round on the back of that growth

12:51 20VC: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business | Why Growth Expectations Today are BS and Will Not Last | Why Oren Zeev Takes $0 Management Fees But 30% Carry | Why GPs Should Not Tell LPs Their Strategy

Harry Stebbings · Feb 23, 2026

The 2020-21 generation of enterprise SaaS companies doubling and tripling at $10-20M revenue are good companies but not great ones, and would have been funded well in the prior cycle but no longer excite investors

31:20 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

Harry Stebbings · Mar 7, 2026

Investors push companies to burn because the funding bar has changed from triple-triple-double-double to needing to go from zero to $30-40M for a round to be interesting

Investors need to see growth that clears today's higher bar for the next round

39:54 20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

Harry Stebbings · Jul 27, 2026

Triple, triple, double, double growth is no longer good enough to justify a venture investment given the opportunity cost of capital

Growth expectations have shifted so much that a 1.5 to 5 to 15 trajectory isn't exciting enough relative to what else capital could back

Scope: not belittling such companies, just saying it isn't today's venture game

46:42 20VC: Leading Anthropic's First Ever Round | Will Open Source Threaten Anthropic's Business | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Not Good Enough Today | Why Series A is Hard Today with Matt Murphy @ Menlo

Harry Stebbings · Aug 8, 2026

Triple-triple-double-double growth (e.g. $1.5M to $5M to $15M ARR) is no longer fast enough to be venture-backable.

Venture capital has an opportunity cost of deployment, and a company reaching ~$70M four or five years out is not an interesting return path.

Scope: he acknowledges he gets 'in so much trouble' for saying it

16:37 20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough

Harry Stebbings · Aug 8, 2026

Growth benchmarks have shifted radically — Slack going $1M to $10M in eighteen months was once the gold standard and today's leaders are adding hundreds of millions

75:31 20VC: The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses | Why Founders Should Never Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed | Why Triple, Triple, Double, Double is Good Enough

Harry Stebbings · May 12, 2025 · hedged

His best-performing companies were slow burns that were not obvious winners early on, so early progress is a weak signal.

Linear, Linktree, Captions, Next Health and AgentSync are all solid ~$50M revenue companies today but were slow burns and not obvious early — possibly because they are enterprise businesses.

Scope: may be specific to enterprise companies; based on his Fund I portfolio

35:27 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

The prior generation of ~20%-growth SaaS companies are good, durable businesses that deserve to endure and compound even though venture capital no longer wants to fund them

They are profitable absent sales and marketing spend, their customers like them, and given alternate capital to fund growth they will create value on a longer timeline

Scope: value creation takes longer; they are simply not in the zeitgeist

50:19 20VC: General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart | Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM | Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds | Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

Harry Stebbings · Feb 9, 2026

Some companies have a very long start line — it takes years of building before growth shows, as with Figma's first three or four years

47:22 20VC: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI | Do Margins Matter Anymore | Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead Today? | Who Wins the Dev Market: Cursor or Claude Code | Why We Are Not in an AI Bubble with Anish Acharya @ a16z

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

Slow burners are still legitimate investments — not every founder learns and not every market grows at the same pace

Life isn't perfect, so portfolios shouldn't be expected to contain only perfect fast-growing companies

76:01 20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina

David George · Dec 15, 2025 · hedged

The triple-triple-double-double growth benchmark is not dead, but the right primary measure is return on invested capital — proxied at early stage by efficiency of customer acquisition — and required growth depends on the market you're in

Not every company needs to go zero to a hundred; what matters is capital efficiency and market context rather than a universal growth curve

Scope: market-dependent

31:53 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z

Anish Acharya · Feb 9, 2026

Growth benchmarks are only heuristics; what should be evaluated is the founder's assumptions, whether the data validates them, and the area under the curve rather than slope alone

Some companies have complex, slower growth stories but much larger area under the curve than high-slope companies that may have defensibility problems

46:27 20VC: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI | Do Margins Matter Anymore | Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead Today? | Who Wins the Dev Market: Cursor or Claude Code | Why We Are Not in an AI Bubble with Anish Acharya @ a16z

Anish Acharya · Feb 9, 2026

Area-under-the-curve companies must sustain enough momentum and customer substantiality — customers paying upfront and expanding — to keep fundraising through a long build

Their difficulty is idiosyncratic: without visible momentum they can't keep raising the capital a long arc requires

48:08 Long arc companies must show momentum to keep getting funded

Harry Stebbings · Dec 15, 2025

A solid slow-compounding business can still be the wrong investment because the opportunity cost of capital is so high when the alternative is companies like Gamma, Harvey or Lovable

His and his LPs' dollars are precious; the question isn't whether a business is good but whether it's the best available home for capital

32:52 Opportunity cost of capital disqualifies slow compounders

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

There is a bloated set of good companies compounding around 25% that are stuck in purgatory — too small for public markets and too slow for venture funding — and this is where financing innovation like a customer value fund is needed

Public markets only want billion-dollar companies growing 30%+, and venture economics can't fund slower compounders, leaving these companies with no capital source

60:20 Mid growth compounders are stuck in a financing gap needing new vehicles

Harry Stebbings · Jun 22, 2026

A billion-dollar exit no longer generates venture-scale returns — funds now need $10B, $20B or $30B outcomes — and most founders don't comprehend this

54:01 Billion dollar outcomes no longer clear the venture bar

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

To be in the top decile of startups on performance, valuation and outcomes, you must grow 3x in the first year past $1M, 3x the second year, then 2x for each of the next three years, which lands you above $100M revenue in five years

14:54 3x 3x 2x 2x 2x growth path from 1m arr defines top decile outcomes

Jason Lemkin · Aug 23, 2023

The pass founders got for slowing growth is over — they must return to triple-triple-double-double growth or their venture story is finished

Last year VCs had too many fires to worry about a well-funded company growing only 60%; that reprieve was temporary, and no venture outcome, from $300M to $10B, escapes the growth requirement

22:23 Growth slowdown tolerance was temporary founders must return to triple triple double double

Harry Stebbings · May 18, 2026

A dividend-paying company can't deliver what VCs need, because you cannot dividend your way to a fund return

VCs are looking for fund returners

60:15 Dividend payers cannot return a fund

Peter Singlehurst · Mar 19, 2025

Holding companies through long stretches of unprofitability is justified when scalability and enduring competitive advantages eventually convert into scale and profits, as with Amazon and Tesla despite being called daft for owning them

They lived through many years of unprofitability at Amazon from 2004 and Tesla from 2013 and watched competitive advantages manifest into profitability

32:32 Years of unprofitability are justified when scalability and moats eventually convert to profit