Aptiv's 24% Monthly Growth

A story about Aptiv's rapid growth and the challenges that came with it.

"We launched the business 3 years ago and we grew beautifully. We did $5,000 of revenue in November of 2015 and $1,700,000 in July of 2017, which represents a 24% compounded monthly growth rate.

The problem with that level of growth is that growth is very expensive, and the problem with expensive growth is that you burn an obscene amount of money. We realized we were burning a little over $2,000,000 a month. In July of 2017, we burned $2,400,000.

Burn is an interesting thing. There are the tactical challenges with burn - you're actually running out of money, you have to pay people, you have to pay for things. But if you ignore the tactical problems, the real problem is that you're losing control of your company. You're losing control of the thing that you want to build because if you're constantly burning money, you're constantly raising money, and if you're constantly raising money, you're at the whim of the investor community. You don't get to have the say that you want to have on the product you're building."