What happens before growth?
The Inflection Point
8 Lessons Science can teach us about business growth
During the past two months, I’ve witnessed the meteoric rise in revenue of Copy.ai, a startup using Artificial Intelligence (GPT-3) for copywriting. I can only describe the experience with awe:
It led me to meditate about growth. In particular, how does growth happen in nature?
Most forces in nature, like tornados, and hurricanes, leave a trail of destruction behind them. But CopyAI is different it’s creating massive wealth: saving businesses thousands of hours, creating better marketing material than even humans could, and transforming the way we engage with information online.
It was up to me to understand what growth was from a scientific perspective and how can it be applied to business. I dived into the realms of Physics, Biology, and History to find 8 Laws of Growth and its business interpretation:
1. Select the right type of growth
Human cells have three different forms of growing: by division, by combination, and by size. Each one serves a different purpose and can be applied to a particular problem.
Growth by division is the most common of all, used to grow and maintain the size and homeostasis. It happens once a cell reaches a certain size, it splits right from the middle into 2 new cells, each once getting a strain of DNA, and enough cytoplasm to fill its body, and grow a protective membrane.
The second type of growth happens during fecundation. In this, the genetic material from each parent combines to form a new organism, growth by combination is mostly governed by chance and is the favorite mechanism of nature to evolve. The process results in a zygote a new cell that will develop into a new organism combining the genetic material from each parent.
Finally, growth by size happens only in neurons: interestingly, most of the neurons are created during the earliest stages of development, as life passes each neuron form new connections to their neighbors and thus increasing its size. However, if a neuron were split, it would lose information, and that is why they keep growing in size, up to the point where humans, can grow a single neuron up to 15,000 connections.
Business Interpretation
As an organization grows, most of the growth can be handled by scaling the number of employees. The success of this kind of growth is correlated to how well each task is documented and the key traits for success are identified during recruitment.
When looking for innovation, it’s important to foster collaboration between departments: by combining different skillsets and ways to look at the problems new solutions will be found.
Finally, one of the toughest decisions to make is who to promote, following the example from neurons, promote the person that is best-connected to different areas of the organization or industry, as the knowledge they have cannot be independently acquired nor duplicated.
Just as with neurons continue giving them more connections, information, and power as long as they keep making good decisions.
2. Growth creates its own rules
Curiously, in the beginning, everything was energy, and the forces of physics were created soon after the Big Bang happened. We usually consider laws of nature as timeless, but it turns out they had a beginning and even a development process.
For example, the four main forces of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak, were united at the beginning, and it was gravity the first force to pull apart from the rest.
Business Interpretation
Uber found success in the highly regulated taxi market, instead of trying to adapt to the existing legislation, their innovation ended up pushing forward proposal 22 in California that transformed how employment is viewed in the gig economy.
While it is tempting, to understand or control growth, is probably best to accept the fact that growth is a mighty force that cannot be tempered.
“After detecting growth, remove any obstacle in its way.”
3. You can predict where growth will happen.
Going back to the Big Bang, there are two reasons why galaxies exist: the first is quantum fluctuations which we can basically call chance, the second and most interesting is gravity.
After quantum fluctuations took effect, packets of energy were brought together by the pull of gravity, this resulted in agglomerations that eventually lead to becoming the galaxies we all come to admire.
Business Interpretation
While there is a big element of chance as to where specifically growth will occur, investors, entrepreneurs, and engineers can foresee the area, industry, or technology that will manifest in growth. These early clues can be thought under the influence of “gravity”, just find where people and resources are being brought together.
Copy AI founders beautifully predicted a trend since the emergence of GPT-2. Once, GPT-3 was released they knew the world would not be the same and rapidly build a company around it.
4. Growth is the child of successful parents.
This law is probably best appreciated in Rome’s emergence: the civilization that ruled during antiquity was the convergence of two earlier civilizations.
The philosophical Greek that brought us democracy and the ideas behind the Republic. And the Etruscans, pragmatic people that served as the cornerstone to the mighty engineering behind roads, aqueducts, and warfare technology that powered Rome’s hegemony.
Business Interpretation
Startup accelerators encourage you to find co-founders. While emotional support plays a big role in the reasons behind this, by far the strongest motivation for this is the confluence and diversity that a multi-disciplinary team can provide.
This is best expressed in the all-time great dynamic duo: the smart technical engineer, and the creative non-technical marketing genius.
When looking for a co-founder, purposefully, optimize for diversity to maximize your chances of success!
5. Initial conditions matter, a lot!
According to Yuval N. Harari, the author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, agriculture aroused independently in roughly seven different locations.
While is tempting to give credit to the mighty civilizations that domesticated their respective environments. The truth is, success was more dependant on having adequate flora, fauna, and weather to get started.
Business Interpretation
Nowadays, Kimberly-Clark is the leading supplier of paper-based consumer products, but as documented in “Good to Great” by James C. Collins their growth only was possible after the gutsy decision to sell the mills.
Before starting a new business, think about the initial conditions: is your network strong? do you enjoy financial stability? how mature is the market for your product or service?
No matter how talented and hard-worker you might if the initial conditions are not optimal is very likely you’ll face failure!
6. Growth can be lethal, learn to regulate it.
Cancer, the deadliest sickness of the past century teaches us a valuable lesson: growth is not an absolute good. It can be harmful and impossible to recover if the right mechanisms to monitor and regulate it are not in place.
Earlier, we spoke about cell division, and interestingly, before a cell divides two checkpoints happen: the first is to ensure the size of the cell is sufficient to support two new child cells, the second check is about the consistency in the genetic material,
It is in this second check where mutations leading to cancer normally happen. That is why, to avoid genetic corruption, a single cell, usually, do not divide more than 50 times.
Business Interpretation
Big tech corporations as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have become under scrutiny in the last decades based on monopolized practices, this can be understood as excessive growth in a particular area or industry.
While it is counter-intuitive to regulate growth, many failed start-ups wish they have had regulation mechanisms to prevent aggressive hiring and marketing practices after new funding was closed.
Reflection: does your organization have the correct checks to ensure your current growth is sustainable?
7. Growth is not eternal, but it can be perpetuated.
I could not find a single example where growth would go on forever. It is even understood that because of the continuous space expansion activity in the universe will eventually stop, or even collapse.
Black Holes, the single most dominant structures of the galaxy are also in danger of perishing by evaporation as proven by Stephen Hawkings.
“The truth is, that as an organism grows larger, it becomes less of a hunter and more of a prey.”
To circumvent the eventual fate, life has evolved molecules like DNA, that preserve the progress made by evolution despite the eventual decay and death of single organisms.
Business Interpretation
When leading a colossal business, it might not be easy to accept the tragic fate that will eventually come. But as the organization grows it should be less concerned about maintaining its growth trajectory, and more focused on preserving its legacy.
Financially this can be done through acquisition and investments in smaller faster-growing organizations, as Yahoo did with Alibaba. Thus, instead of incorporating them into the conglomerate, support and empower them with resources but give them enough freedom to follow their own path.
Be like a wise parent with your investments: guide, empower, and provide them but abstain from controlling them. And when they make their own investments be even more generous, supportive, and understanding as a grandparent does.
8. Growth is fractal.
The second law of thermodynamics states that systems tend to fall into chaos as time passes. But during my research, a pattern emerged across the macro to microstructures where an order is continuously present:
The universe was born,
and then galaxies were formed,
stars and solar systems arranged,
and eventually, life appeared.The planet evolved life,
and life into humans,
who build civilizations,
and now create using tech.
Business Interpretation
It would appear, that growth is written in the laws of nature, and it is logical to think so: in a universe that does not contemplate growth, there could not be self-conscious.
So be optimistic about your business, your prospects, and follow the recommendations above, growth for your business will happen.
Stay positive, keep trying, and eventually growth will happen: it’s a universal law.
Epilogue
Thank you for making it to the end, I enjoyed doing this research and I hope you found it useful. I’m a Social Media Strategist and Growth Hacker, you can connect with me on Twitter.
If you believe this article has the potential to be turned into a book I would love to hear encouragement from you. I’m also building a startup: SocialQ.
Special thanks, to Paul Yacobian from CopyAI that inspired this article, co-worker Paola who shared valuable insights while writing the article, and to the milliard of contributors from Wikipedia and YouTube that provided factual information for the article.
During the research I also consulted the following books, all of them are widely recommended:
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
- The 48 Laws of Power
Please consider granting this article some claps, and follow me to stay tuned for monthly blog entries. I will appreciate and reply to your comments. Happy growth!
