Hockey sticks don't look like hockey sticks

“Hockey stick” growth has long been the elusive goal of Silicon Valley (and Valley-esque) venture-capital-backed startups. It’s so named because the graph of some company metric — users, revenue, retention, orders — starts low and flat, then slowly lifts, then turns steeper and steeper into a near-vertical line representing thunderous growth. For example, here’s two hockey-stick graphs showing the revenues of Alphabet (Google), and Meta (Facebook). Alphabet Revenue, billions 3 2 1 0