WHAT ARE THE BEST METRICS FOR MEASURING A STARTUP'S POTENTIAL?

IN HIS 2012 ESSAY "Startup = Growth," Paul Graham talks about a 5% to 7% weekly growth rate as table stakes for startup success. If you're growing 10%, he says, you're doing "exceptionally well."

- ANDY DUNN

Andy Dunn, the founding CEO of Bonobos and Pie, offers advice on leading teams, building things, and surviving the startup life. Got a question for Andy? Send it to askandy@fortune.​com.

What's stayed with me most from that essay is the way that Graham, a cofounder of the accelerator Y Combinator, articulates how gunning for 10% can create what he calls "evolutionary pressure" that forces founders to discover what the startup is for.

"If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary," he writes, "you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with."