Confusion arises for a lot of reasons, but cancer definitely isn&#x27;t a useful analogy to discuss a blog post that starts &quot;Most high-growth businesses...&quot;<p>It&#x27;s definitely the metric that counts for the kinds of businesses Andreessen Horowitz cares about.<p>Microsoft and Yahoo are particularly confusing examples, because they are both very large companies who enjoyed a lot of first mover advantage, but were started almost 20 years apart. And then ended up as very direct competition, before settling down as symbiotic partners. If you really want to use an example from biology, you should look at gut bacteria.