For some time, scale and scaling — meaning that a business grows to ever-greater size — have been the holy grail of the startup and corporate world. Implicitly many believe that if something doesn’t scale, then it’s a failure. Bigger means better, and not-bigger means failure. For example, we know one entrepreneur who created a popular social network, but because it did not scale to become one of the major social networks, for some time he saw his business as a failure even though it throws off millions in revenue and brings together communities who all enjoy the same game. Likewise, we have written about the experimentation process that led to Rent the Runway, but because this business has inherent limits to scale tied to renting physical assets, some have pushed back on the example because “it didn’t really scale.”
