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Planning the aggressive case
When growth leader Amol Avasare joined in 2024, revenue was in the hundreds of millions. In his second week, the company was doing its 2025 revenue planning with a base case and an aggressive case, and Dario pushed the aggressive one while people panicked about how to hit it. Dario thought the company could go much higher than that. Revenue then reached the aggressive case.
The slowdown that never came
By the end of 2025, the expectation was a big slowdown, since the baseline was 10 billion dollars and the law of large numbers looked set to bite. It has not slowed. The 19 billion dollar figure from the end of February was already out of date by the time of the interview.
Inside the company, linear charts have gone out of style. Everything is shown on a log-linear scale.
Why do companies chart growth on log scales?
On a log scale, equal vertical distances represent equal ratios, so steady exponential growth shows up as a straight line. On a linear chart, a tenfold climb squashes the early years into a flat line near zero and makes the latest year look like a cliff. Log scales let viewers compare growth rates across very different sizes. Epidemiologists used log-scale charts widely during the COVID-19 pandemic for the same reason.
Why does growth slow as companies get bigger?
Percentage growth on a larger base requires larger absolute gains. A company going from 1 billion to 10 billion dollars in revenue adds 9 billion in one year. Investor Neeraj Agrawal of Battery Ventures popularized a benchmark for software startups called T2D3, in which revenue triples twice and then doubles three times.
Why do companies plan base and aggressive cases?
Scenario planning lets a company commit to spending that depends on how fast it grows, such as hiring and computing capacity, without betting everything on one forecast. The method is usually traced to Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s, where planners used scenarios to prepare for oil shocks. A base case sets the budget the company is confident in, and an aggressive case sets what it must be ready to scale up for.
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