In defense of exponentials

I used to tell founders the reaction they would get at launch is not hate — it is indifference. That framing is still right, but it hides a second-order truth about how truly exponential outcomes actually feel from the inside.

The first eighteen months of an exponential look identical to a failure. Metrics are noisy, retention is bad, the founding team is exhausted. The only signal that separates the future 100× from the flat lines is a small cohort of users who describe the product with unreasonable intensity.

That cohort is what to bet on. Not top-of-funnel, not press hits, not seed round social velocity. The specific way that ten users talk about a product in month six is the strongest signal we have found across four funds.

Everything downstream is compounding. If those ten users become a hundred, and the intensity holds, the fund-returning outcome is already priced in. The problem is nobody notices until the exponential is already visible on a log chart, and by then the price has moved.