Growth is the default objective of startup culture because it serves the interests of the investment model that funds startup culture. Investors need returns that justify the risk of failure across their portfolio, and returns require exits, and exits require scale. The logic is internally consistent and completely irrelevant to the question of what a particular business should optimize for when no investor is involved and no exit is required. The assumption that growth is always the right answer for every business is an artifact of the particular funding structure that makes it true for the businesses in that funding structure, imported wholesale into contexts where the structure doesn’t apply.