“Simultaneously, watching your company continue as a cash cow can be painful. It was for us, at least. Sure, it was continuing to make a lot of money for Jim and I, but it was stagnant and boring. The downside of running a cashcow is that you don’t want to do anything substantially different to make it better. The idea is that you milk the cow until it is dead, and hopefully invest that money into new things. Changing anything could screw the money machine up, so you tend not to take any risks. But it almost physically hurts to see the thing you worked so hard on be put into this mode, because you know that in this mode, death is inevitable.”
–Jason Hong, writing On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry, explaining how the HotOrNot team turned their previous management model upside down to tear down and rebuild(they hope).