The Only Way to Grow Huge
> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.This is a bad opening premise.  Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies to me.  Boeing is pretty huge and they don't sell anything directly to ordinary consumers.  I would never run around marketing Pfizer products to my friends.Take a scan down the Fortune 500 and "viral" growth companies are in the minority.Even limiting yourself to tech companies, which I presume is all that the author was thinking of, the principle is no less general.  Epic is a gargantuan EHR vendor and they grew via acquisition of other vendors, not word of mouth.  Cisco did much of the same, and consider Oracle.  The list goes on and on.