Is The Tech Industry Growth Rate Unsustainable?

Apologies for the radio silence. I recently had a fever of 103 (that’s like a billion degrees for the Anglo-inclined amongst our ranks) and whenever I tried to write all the letters looked backwards and my brain felt like a million fire ants were line dancing across my cerebellum.

But I’m told that I’m back to what is considered ‘normal brain function by my standard’ (my personal baseline is between Koko the Gorilla and a badger drunk on fermented apples), and I thought it would be cathartic to moan about the state of tech in 2025.

My main gripe? There’s just way too much. 

I understand that statement is almost frustratingly vague. What I mean in a deeper sense is that tech tries to do and be too much nowadays. 

Due to tech company’s messianic pursuit of growth, tech ‘platforms’ have ballooned into all-encompassing everything apps that are so afraid of missing out on some of that sweet revenue squeeze that they’re trying to position themselves as a one-stop shop to sell goods, play games, meet people and sow the discordance needed to topple the West’s cultural oligopoly, all in one convenient UI. 

The problem with the tech industry growth obsession

When you’re a kid, you’re taught pretty universally that monopoly = bad. 

When you enter the tech workforce in 2025, you might not be openly told monopoly = good in your onboarding pack you get with your hoodie and free mug, but it’s very much an unsaid rule. 

Most tech companies are looking to fully corner a market, which by definition is a monopoly, in order to maximise their revenue and build a solid base without competition forcing them to cut costs and continue on subsistence level profits, or mostly, lose money until they can be crowned the winner. 

But do you know what’s weird? I don’t actually see anything wrong with this, in theory. It's fine to be growth obsessed when you're a small plucky startup. I work in a growth role, and I love helping build startups and bringing cutting-edge solutions to users.

Tech companies usually start with a hyper-specific niche rather than a meaningful (and worryingly) large target market, and produce excellent tools and services for that niche, and as such, become a dominant player in that market, whilst also being a net positive for the industry they’re serving. 

Take, for example, the early days of Uber. For end consumers, Uber was cheap, quick and effective. For drivers, it opened up additional revenue streams and provided an easy way to pick up fares. 

So what happened?

The problem with an infinite tech growth model is that pretty quickly, a small startup becomes a big stalwart, and will hit one of two problems.

The first is that they’ve juiced all the revenue possible from their small sub niche, and can’t grow anymore in that specific vertical. With an infinite growth model, that’s not acceptable. A lot of C-suite executives are incentivised via the company's share price, and the share price will only continue to go up if the company can be seen to be growing.

The second is that the way they cornered their sub niche is unsustainable, or they pursued it in an unsustainable way, but couldn’t corner the market. 

In the Uber example, they were taking a bath on basically every ride in an attempt to be the dominant player, but they couldn’t quite kill off the copycats like Lyft and Bolt, meaning they’re stuck in a spiral of losing money to keep their status as top dog in ridesharing.

If they raise their fares too much, they lose revenue. If they keep them too low, they burn too much capital without a way to convince investors they can become a dominant player. They’re quite literally stuck, which is why they offer train tickets and food delivery now, because they want to position themselves as a ‘moving anything around’ company rather than a ridesharing app, because the growth opportunities are more evident in the sufficiently vague concept of moving something from point A to point B and getting paid for it.

This ‘maximalist’ approach pursuing growth at all costs, even when you have ARR equivalent to the GDP of an island nation, causes a host of issues, as platforms come to dominate more and more of our daily life. Look at Amazon, which now controls not only a lion's share of online shopping, but also grocery stores and web hosting, when originally it started as a way to buy books. 

Just think about that for a second. It was a website to buy books, and now most of the world’s Internet infrastructure relies on it. 

This centralisation and monopolistic practice almost always leads to a degraded service for the end user, as anyone who has tried to use Uber recently will attest.

But there is a solution.

Why tech needs a more minimalist approach

Tech companies should put a greater emphasis on solving a core problem, and that problem can’t be “a bunch of VCs aren’t rich enough yet”.

This means putting more power back in the hands of the actual builders and problem solvers, and yes, more bootstrapped companies offering tools to smaller niches.

And how will they do this without giving into the temptation of sweet sweet VC cash? The two hottest vowels on the planet right now : AI.

I am so so bullish on the impact of AI for enhancing the productivity of small, creative teams and reducing overheads. About 5-10 years ago, I wouldn’t have even bothered to write this blog because it would have seemed like a fool's errand.

But with lowering of the barriers to entry, it’s not unfeasible to think that a 3 person team can be as productive as a 15 person team could 10 years ago. As headcount is the #1 expense for every business, it’s a core reason that outside investment is courted. By keeping overheads low with AI tools, builders will be able to bootstrap companies to build tools, not platforms. Savvy teams will embed AI into their processes from day one, meaning that when they do start to see success, there's not as much pressure on them to pursue growth über alles, as they'll either still be privately owned, or they'll be able to retain more control for themselves via equity they didn't have to sell for a fifth matcha barista in their swanky 200 person office.

The impact

By focusing more on tool-building and supercharging development with AI, what you’ll see is a more diverse and deeper tech space, sparking a series of intra-disciplinary innovations that provide better, more specialist tools for end users. Products will be shipped quicker, will be able to be tailored to individual use cases in a more robust manner.

This AI augmented specification provides waaaay more room for entrepreneurial spirit, as people will be able to focus on building tools that help, rather than complete with monopolistic platforms that dominate daily life. 

Currently, almost all startups are at risk of being crushed like a piglet beneath a sow by the big platforms that dominate life as we know it. By removing one of the biggest weapons these giant, inflexible behemoths have over small teams (the cash needed for big teams, fancy offices and marketing), you open the playing field for talented entrepreneurs to create world-class tools without being outspent, copied or buried in the course of competitive business practices with a limitless adversary.

This is all very pie-in-the-sky, especially in today’s regulatory climate, but my hope is that AI empowers those with agency and a vision to create truly helpful and impactful tools to empower human creativity and productivity, and reduce the centralisation we have started to see over the past 10 years that has frozen innovation.