Author: Geoff Perlman

When I was a kid, computers were responsible for almost nothing, at least in my daily life. Big companies used computers to run their accounting departments and NASA used them for analysis, but most peoples’ daily lives were unaffected by the existence of computers.

Last October, I wrote a blog post about how vulnerable Google is in its search business (the overwhelming source of its revenue). I realized this vulnerability after discovering that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, was started for less than $10 million, has equivalent search results, a clean looking interface and a low cost of switching. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over 8 months now, I didn’t make the switch from Google for privacy reasons, I simply liked the cleaner interface, but I’ll be honest and say that the privacy it offers is something I appreciate. Apparently, I’m among a growing group of savvy searchers.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper revealing his theory of Special Relativity to the world. The theory says that not only do mass and energy have an equivalence (an idea that was not new) but that they have a specific equivalence expressed in the equation E=mc². That equation basically says that the faster you go, the more energy you need to continue to accelerate. The unfortunate consequence of this is that you can’t reach the speed of light because at that point, your mass would be infinite which is of course, impossible.

It occurred to me recently that this concept applies to more than just the cost of going acceleration. For example, the larger a company gets in terms of just about any way a company is measured (revenue, profit, employees, customers, etc.), the harder it is to continue growing at that same rate. It isn’t that big companies don’t grow, they of course do, but they don’t grow a lot compared to smaller companies. It’s not difficult to grow from $100,000 to $1 million in sales compared to growing from $1 million to $100 million.