The venture narrative focuses on 'slope' (rapid growth) but often misses the value of 'area under the curve' companies. These startups, like Figma, may have a slower growth story as they build deep moats. This long-term focus can create more durable value than high-slope businesses with weaker defensibility.

Venture capital lionizes companies with immediate, steep growth ("high slope"). However, many of the most significant, defensible companies like Figma are "area under the curve" stories. They endure a long build phase before emerging as dominant, creating more long-term value than companies with fast but less defensible growth.

In an era of rapid technological shifts, durable value comes not from steady revenue growth but from a founder's capacity to reinvent the company repeatedly. Databricks' CEO Ali Ghodsi exemplifies this by successfully navigating multiple S-curves, which is the true driver of long-term success.

Initial data suggested the market for design tools was too small to build a large business. Figma's founders bet on the trend that design was becoming a key business differentiator, which would force the market to expand. They focused on building for the trend, not the existing TAM.

Fathom's strategy was to build a robust system for meeting capture and processing, anticipating that transcription costs would drop and GenAI would mature. When GPT-4 launched, they simply "dropped in the engine" to their pre-built "sports car," instantly upgrading their value and triggering explosive growth from $1M to $10M ARR.

Investors like Stacy Brown-Philpot and Aileen Lee now expect founders to demonstrate a clear, rapid path to massive scale early on. The old assumption that the next funding round would solve for scalability is gone; proof is required upfront.

Founders often mistake $1M ARR for product-market fit. The real milestone is proven repeatability: a predictable way to find and win a specific customer profile who reliably renews and expands. This signal of a scalable business model typically emerges closer to the $5M-$10M ARR mark.

Unlike SaaS, deep tech companies have a unique valuation trajectory: a sharp seed-to-Series A increase, a long plateau during R&D, and then massive step-ups post-production. This requires a bimodal investment strategy focusing on early stage and the final private round before inflection.

Redpoint's early-growth fund concentrates on Series B deals, entering after product-market fit is established but before explosive growth becomes apparent in the metrics. The strategy is to invest "a half step before something becomes obvious in the numbers," capturing value at a critical turning point.