Note: This article is the concluding post in a four-part series about growth. Following World War II, the United States enjoyed unprecedented economic success as a victor of the war and the only major nation that did not suffer homeland infrastructure losses. In the US, the post-War period included an expansion of worker rights but hit a turning point in roughly 1968 which began the dismantling of those same rights. We now refer to the dominant monetary-economic philosophy of the past 30-50 years as “neoliberalism.” Among other things, it included a commitment to private sector deregulation, financialization, elimination of worker…
Hypergrowth basics
Note: This article is part three in an ongoing series about growth. The past twelve years have seen major changes in how Silicon Valley startups talk and think about growth. Around the time of the 2007-2008 financial crash, a set of integrated technologies (mobile, wifi, cloud, open source, HTML 5) reached what Carlota Perez calls the Deployment phase of maturity, sparking a new, long boom of technological innovation and VC investment. The FANGA companies and their children—AirBnB and Uber, and dozens of SaaS startups—have been the most obvious beneficiaries and leaders of this new phase. With this change in the hardware…