Start-ups grow in line with their genes

Companies are not 'inanimate' entities; each has its own 'biological' character

Every species has a natural growth rate, determined by its genetics, metabolism and environment. Nature discourages a species growing artificially outside certain limits. Fruit flies don’t try to become as big as cows and cows don’t try to become big like elephants.

Max Kleiber, a Swiss-born academic at Davis, California, demonstrated in the 1930s that every species has, on an average, a stable number of heartbeats. For example, the cow species is 1,000 times heavier than the woodchuck species. Cows have a lifespan that is the “square root of the square root of 1,000”, which is 5.5 times longer than that