I recently saw a tweet[1] about how people should go about starting startups/businesses, and it caused me to formalize my intuitions around two distinct types of tech businesses I am familiar with. I’ll call them $O(n)$ startups and $O(n^{2})$ startups. Throughout this essay, let n represent the time elapsed since launch. An $O(n)$ startup grows its key metric (revenue, users, etc.) roughly linearly with time—double the time, double the metric. An $O(n^{2})$ startup accelerates, with growth comp...