I mean, I know from my economics studies that businesses kind of have to keep competing or they die. It's just really sad.
As a late 40s VP at that same company, we’re about 25x the revenue and a greater ratio than that of free cash flow, employ far more people, and serve far more customers. That’s not in any way sad.
The payoff if the growth attempts work is asymmetric, so it’s worth the risk.
The point being to help finance someone making a self sustaining product.
So customers get a product, workers get a salary, 'investors' (doners really) break even.
I do this. My business has linear growth (which means if you look at year-to-year percentage increases, they decrease over time). I'm very happy with it — I have no pressure from VCs to achieve crazy user growth at all cost, no pressure to show exponential growth. The business works well, the customers are happy, things are good!
There are many businesses like this, they just tend not to be the fashionable ones. You won't read a techcrunch article about one of them. Press will call them disparagingly "lifestyle businesses".
And yet — these are the businesses that make most sense for the users! In a company like that, business goals are 100% aligned with user goals. The business makes money if the users continue paying the subscription fees, which they will do if they are happy and get value from the software.
Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of growth.
I hope somebody will start a Dropbox competitor as a bootstrapper, with a long-term outlook, no VC funding, and no crazy growth targets. Just do file sync right without eating so much CPU and battery, and without pestering me with useless add-ons, and you'll have my money.