Any apparent concerns about 'too much growth' are actually just concerns about how challenges to growth are to be navigated thereby allowing higher growth to take place.

This is all well and fine. But, in the natural world, that kind of uni-dimensional view of growth has a different word associated with it: metastasis. The exponential growth of a cell without limits ultimately destroys the systems of the organism. We call it 'cancer' once its recognized. It’s a non-systemically aware feedback loop that cannot stop itself.

Interesting that we all desire a runaway feedback loop of growth when it comes to our businesses, but nowhere else in our lives. Obviously, we don't want runaway cell replication, climate change, or compounding of public debt... Are we missing anything here? An entire class of economics called Environmental Economics or “steady-state economics” addresses these issues. Be warned, these theorists are glum folks and they aren’t free market mavens. And they don’t write columns for the Wall Street Journal or Fortune. They talk about stuff like “market failures” and unaccounted externalities that contain the hidden costs of our runaway obsession with growth. Even if one rejects the conclusions, the perspective is enlightening.

When we are honest with ourselves, the default setting for entrepreneurs today is this: Growth is the only game. We celebrate the best emerging companies that post 300-500% growth year over year… Sure, we do expect that rate to begin leveling off (but not too much!) as they scale into their eponymous “growth” status many years down the line as public companies. As we all know, Wall Street reinforces this worldview in an extremely orthodox manner via quarterly earnings discipline and analyst ratings.

But, what would a startup culture that valued something on equal footing with growth look like? Could there be anything else?

Its actually not a speculative question, and its been answered by millions of businesses around the world for hundreds of years. We just don’t like the answer in Silicon Valley… The businesses that are run this way are typically (often disparagingly) called “lifestyle businesses.”

What I see and admire in so-called lifestyle businesses is that they have brought other values to bear besides growth. Often because they’ve executed into the natural limit to what they can make in their operating environment relative to potential organic growth. They find homeostasis. What else do they value? Many choose to value their roles in a community, or as employers of great people, or their historicity, their educational or non-profit involvement, and their overall contribution to quality of life.

While this lifestyle business culture is well accepted in many industries, we don’t really like it very much in the tech world. There's no time for that because we're doing the "real work" of changing the world... In reality, its our M&A/IPO focused exit strategies that preclude their serious consideration. It seems to run counter to our deepest assumptions about what a tech company should be: high growth with a liquidity event.

But, things are changing. I think you can have both growth and a sense of operational latitude to become something else of intrinsic value.

I would call a tech company that truly appreciates growth in the context of other values  a "Growth Lifestyle Company" They certainly exist... I think I might be the CEO of one right now and I know of others. For us, our intrinsic value is creative latitude. We treat it like a real currency. It expresses itself in many ways that I know wouldn't be so easily allowed in a traditional software company, from product design to employee free-time, to the kinds of customers with whom we engage.

I will try to work up some definitional points of what a growth lifestyle company looks like. But, the current economic environment combined with the increasing ease with which one can bootstrap a tech startup ensures that we'll see many more of them in the future.