In 2025, "fast growth" doesn't mean adding a few customers over months. It means going from launch to millions in recurring revenue in weeks.
Lovable. Sierra. Cursor. Wiz. All hit $100M in ARR in under 18 months. If Slack's three-year sprint to $100M felt fast, we've now entered a different dimension entirely. Lovable, the Swedish "vibe-coding" startup, went from public launch in late 2024 to $100M ARR in just over a year. Then doubled to $200M in less than 12 months more.
This isn't just fast. It's accelerating fast. The curve is bending upward.
And here's what nobody talks about: when the speed limit changes, everything that worked before becomes dangerously slow. Companies doing $10M+ in ARR at 20% growth are watching VCs walk away. Not because they're failing — because the definition of success just shifted under their feet.
The question isn't whether this is sustainable (it probably isn't). The question is: what do you build to survive in a world where this is the pace?
The Invisible Infrastructure
Most advice about hypergrowth focuses on the visible stuff: hire faster, ship faster, sell faster. But talk to people inside these companies and you'll notice they talk about something different.
They talk about having the context they need, when they need it. Not perfect information. Not real-time dashboards on everything. But enough visibility across the business that they can make decisions without waiting days for someone to pull a report or schedule a meeting.
It's not magic. It's infrastructure. The kind that doesn't show up in funding announcements but determines whether you can actually handle the speed you're targeting.
The Departmental Trap
Traditional companies divide reality into departments. Sales owns pipeline data. Product owns usage metrics. Customer success owns health scores. Marketing owns campaign performance. Finance owns the "official" numbers.
It's a sensible division of labor. Everyone has their domain, their tools, their expertise.
And it works perfectly fine at 20% annual growth.
At 200% monthly growth? The gaps between those domains become dangerous.
Product ships a feature based on usage data, not knowing that sales just pivoted to a segment that doesn't need it. Sales closes deals in a vertical that customer success hasn't figured out how to support yet. Marketing finds a channel that floods the pipeline, but nobody realizes those leads convert at half the rate until months later when finance runs the numbers.
By the time you discover these misalignments, you've already built the wrong things, sold to the wrong people, invested in the wrong channels.
Speed doesn't just amplify execution. It amplifies misalignment. And misalignment at hyperspeed is how companies implode.
Visibility Enables Action
Here's what's different about companies moving at these speeds: they don't rely on each team staying in their lane and hoping it all comes together in quarterly reviews.
They build infrastructure where the connections between customer behavior, product usage, and revenue outcomes are visible across teams — not perfectly, not in real-time dashboards of everything, but visible enough that people can make informed decisions without needing to pull three people into a meeting.
But visibility alone isn't the unlock. The real power comes when that visibility is paired with the authority to act on it.
Think about what this combination enables:
A product manager sees that a specific feature drives expansion in enterprise accounts. They don't need to wait for the next planning cycle or get buy-in from five stakeholders. They can reprioritize the roadmap and double down on what's working.
A sales rep notices that customers from a particular segment are converting 3x faster. They don't need to schedule a meeting with ops to update the ideal customer profile. They can adjust their targeting immediately.
A customer success manager spots early warning signals — usage dropping in a segment that typically churns at this stage, customers who haven't adopted retention-driving features. They don't need approval to reach out. They intervene before it's too late.
A marketer discovers that one channel brings in customers who grow with you while another generates leads that churn quickly. They don't wait for quarterly budget reviews. They shift spend the same day.
This is the difference between teams running in parallel and teams actually compounding each other's work. Not just because they can see what's happening, but because they can act on what they see.
The traditional model says: collect data, analyze it, present findings, get approval, then act. That loop takes weeks. At hypergrowth speeds, you don't have weeks.
The new model says: give people the visibility they need and trust them to make good decisions. The loop shrinks to days, or hours.
Context as Competitive Advantage
There's a saying in software: "Fast is slow, but smooth is fast."
The companies hitting these speeds aren't just executing faster. They're making better decisions faster because they've shortened the loop from question to insight to action.
In a fragmented setup, getting context means meetings. Analysis requests. Days of back-and-forth. By the time you have the answer, the question has changed. And even when you have the answer, acting on it often means another round of approvals and coordination.
In a better setup, the context you need is accessible, and you're empowered to act on it. Not ambient awareness of everything — but the specific information you need to make your next decision is available, and you have the authority to execute.
You don't ask "what's happening with enterprise customers?" and wait three days. You can see it. And more importantly, you can do something about it.
You don't wonder if that new feature is driving retention. The data is already connected to outcomes. And you can use that insight to inform your next move.
The bottleneck in hypergrowth isn't "can we ship faster?" It's "do we know what to ship, and can we make that call without waiting for permission?" The constraint isn't execution speed, it's decision speed plus decision authority.
And that comes from the combination of context and empowerment.
The Coordination Problem
Here's the subtle thing: when teams have visibility into how their work connects to the broader business and the autonomy to act on that understanding, coordination becomes easier.
Not automatic. Not perfect. But easier.
Product doesn't ship features that completely surprise customer success because CS has some visibility into what's being built — and because product can see customer health signals that inform prioritization. Sales doesn't close deals that product can't support because there's some transparency into capacity and priorities — and because sales can see what's actually getting adopted.
The key is that visibility flows in multiple directions, and so does the ability to adjust. No single team is making decisions in a vacuum, but no team is paralyzed waiting for central approval either.
You still need meetings. You still need communication. But the infrastructure helps rather than fights you. And crucially, when people can see the impact of their decisions — when a product manager can trace how a feature affects retention, when a marketer can see which channels drive valuable customers — they get better at making those calls.
At 20% growth, you can coordinate through Slack and weekly syncs, with decisions escalating up for approval. At 200% growth, you need the foundation to make coordination less dependent on heroic communication efforts and you need to push decision-making down to the people closest to the information.
This is how small teams do impossible things. Not through perfect information or flawless process, but through infrastructure that makes it easier to stay aligned combined with trust that lets people act on what they see.
The Operating System Question
So here's the real question: if you're building for hypergrowth speeds — or competing with companies that are — what are you actually optimizing for?
Most founders focus on the visible stuff. Hire the best people. Build the best product. Close the best customers. All critical.
But the companies that survive these speeds understand something else: your competitive advantage isn't just what you build or who you hire. It's whether your team can make good decisions at the speed the market demands — and whether they're empowered to execute on those decisions.
And that requires a different kind of infrastructure.
Not perfect dashboards. Not real-time visibility into everything. But a shared operational space where the key connections between customer behavior, product decisions, and business outcomes are visible to the people who need to act on them — combined with the authority to actually do something with that information.
Where getting the context you need to make a decision doesn't require three meetings and two days of analysis.
Where coordination isn't something you layer on top through better communication — it's built into how information flows.
And where the people closest to the work can make calls without waiting for centralized approval, because they have both the information and the trust to act.
This is a cultural shift as much as a technical one. It means hiring for judgment, not just execution. It means being comfortable with some decisions being made wrong, because the alternative — every decision needing approval — is guaranteed to be too slow.
At hypergrowth speeds, this becomes the foundation. The thing that determines whether you accelerate or implode.
Because when the speed limit changes, the infrastructure that got you here won't get you there. And the companies that figure this out early — that build both the visibility and the empowerment — have an advantage that's hard to catch.
The choice isn't between control and chaos. It's between coordinated autonomy enabled by shared context, or fragmented execution slowed by information gaps and approval bottlenecks.
At these speeds, there's only one that works.