Software companies must constantly evolve and capture new growth opportunities or risk slowly declining into irrelevance. Only 3 percent of start-ups grow into companies boasting annual revenue of at least $1 billion.1 Yet that achievement is only the end of the beginning. Act II involves developing into a multibillion-dollar company, and the odds are slim: our latest research shows that of the 3,197 public software companies launched between 1980 and 2013, just 19 have reached $4 billion in annual revenue (Exhibit 1).
