All Western cities face significant challenges on social integration. Our populations are booming, but social integration is not keeping pace. Rapid growth is a sign of our success, but it also puts stress on housing, infrastructure - and on communities.
OK, I wasn't really paying attention to YouTube in the year after it began. No one was. But its growth was remarkably rapid.
For India's economy to expand as rapidly and yet more sustainably than China's, we need to make our differences into virtues rather than vulnerabilities.
Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.
Hotmail went from zero to 12 million users with zero marketing steps. Not a penny was spent on sales and marketing, which was astounding. It showed us the power of the network effect.
Somehow, the company must stay true to the founding vision while avoiding the pitfalls of rapid growth - and perhaps survive the hiring of a previously successful executive who doesn't work out.
I don't have an office. I sit in a cubicle with everybody else. That's partly so no one can ask for an office, which in a fast-growing company isn't practical. But it's also so I can keep my finger on the pulse of how people are feeling.
Mobile is an incredibly fast-growing market and will continue to be.
There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.
When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society's first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages - and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.
Trouble results when the speed of growth exceeds the speed of nurturing human resources. To use the analogy of growth rings in a tree, when unusually rapid growth caused the rings to grow abnormally thick, the tree trunk weakens and is easily broken.
An exponential growth is a simple doubling. One becomes two becomes four.
On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.
It seems like the opportunity just increases exponentially. There doesn't seem to be much stopping.
Science grows like a weed every year.
When I joined Google, it was a 1,500-person company, which I thought was huge, since I don't think of myself as a corporate person.
No police department should hire more quickly than they can assimilate the people that they bring in, and we did. I take responsibility for it. It was the first opportunity I had to hire, and I wanted to do it, and I take responsibility.
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.
We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour.
By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.
Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.
I see easyHotel as one of the best, most natural extensions of the 'easy' brand from the airline. EasyHotel is raising money to accelerate growth at a much faster rate than I could have grown it as a private company, whilst enabling me to spend more time on my diversified portfolio of other investments.
The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented. If you look back over history, whether you're looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the '50s or the '70s, it used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon.
The Godrej group is expanding rapidly. However, we are not diversifying much.
Our growth rate continues to be staggering.
